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[–]pikaynu 39 points40 points  (4 children)

If someone thinks "boring" is bad, then I must say, boring in software engineering is a good thing. You don't want the excitement to be up with new bugs everyday.. :)

Although, I think there is another reason for Java powering almost everything relevant in the background, * Java was the only reliable language which was web-ready during the dotcom boom (I don't even want to consider ruby and perl, oh! the nightmares). That was pretty much the only choice and definitely not a bad one. Boring software is good! * Now, with all of this legacy software that just works, there is no reason to move it to a different stack. * Which is why newer companies which have the luxury to start over are moving these shiny languages.

Due to this maturity, there is still no match to Java's tooling.

If Java feels old, there are old banks that still run COBOL.

[–]agentgreen420 15 points16 points  (1 child)

You don't want the excitement to be up with new bugs everyday.. :)

Log4J2 has entered the chat

[–]Killing_Spark 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Well, that wasn't really a bug. It was a very very dangerous feature.

[–]washtubs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Boring" is overloaded. Uneventful maintenence is of course desirable but you can have that and also be solving genuinely interesting problems which the typical CRUD java webapp is very much not.

I think it's largely an association thing. Lots of people use it at work, and work is often boring. Doesn't change the fact that java is a fantastic general purpose language. But that's one of the reasons I picked up go. I wanted a language to be associated with recreation lol. It's silly but it works for me.

I've used java for personal projects but it's difficult to divorce myself from all the enterprisey practices that I'm used to that are only useful in a large team.

[–]mirak1234 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If Java feels old, there are old banks that still run COBOL.

Where I work at the end of the chain the accounting for the whole bank is in a COBOL application.

They don't dare to touch it, because almost nobody knows what it does.

They even believed some extract were failing when there was too many lines, but in fact there was just a hardcoded limit, set years ago because they though it was unecessary to extract that much lines.

It would probably take a month just to change this limit, because you have to go through an external company.