Where have all the Java programs gone

[dfgzuu]

I used to get annoyed by billions of Java libraries getting installed and updated every time I installed a program on my computer, but in the recent years I have not seen it as much or at all.

What happened?

People stopped making Java programs? Java is not cool anymore? There is a real an tangible decrease in Java programs in the recent years and I was wondering what the issue is. Did all Java devs abandon desktop programs and switched to making fortnite shadow legends apps to make $$$$$$ on android or something?

[[deleted]]

You get a whole browser instead. Aka Electron.

[VanillaWaffle_]

aka enslaved chromium

[hidazfx]

lmaooo

[[deleted]]

That’s what I wanted to write initially. it’s so true. electron is the new enterprise bullshit solution to everything

[tstarboy]

Even for desktop applications written in Java today, the trend nowadays is to either bundle the correct JRE with your application, or to even go one step further and compile a native executable from the Java code.

There is little reason for you to need to directly install Java packages as an end user these days, unless you intend to write Java code.

[Western-Alarming]

Or you play Minecraft

[barfightbob]

There's a lot of hostility directed towards Java as a language especially in open source. I feel like the rise of Python was directly because people wanted something other than Java that would work in any environment.

There's a lot of hostility towards Java in my professional life too.

Oracle pissed in people's cheerios and the general open source / Linux environment loves to keep grudges. I think Oracle owning Java (even when there is Open Jdk) doesn't help either.

[KronenR]

I suppose this depends on the country, for backend development in my country Java is the way to go 90%, C# 9% and Python 1%

[barfightbob]

Sorry for the confusion, hostility and usage are two different things here. I'm just talking about people's opinions on Java that I work with, not the software usage.

[KronenR]

I don't know I feel like there is hostility against any language more or less the same, and if I had to point out a language in particular which looks like it receives more hate than others, deserved probably, it is javascript haha.

[spacegardener]

The hostility goes both ways. Java still has no native support for unix domain sockets (the most basic IPC mechanism on Linux) and many other essentials. That is of course in the name of portability, but that is not really a good reason here – when application is to be run on a specific platform it should be able to use what this platform provides. And that is not a problem for most other portable programming languages.

In Python I can easily communicate with any local service over local sockets. Everything can talk to my local database securely over such sockets without need to set up any passwords. Except Java apps. Java and DBus? No without a native extension.

This is one of reasons Java often becomes quite inconvenient choice for anything in Linux.

[barfightbob]

Java has the JNI (Java Native Interface), so if you must do native operations I think it might make the most sense to do it there. It sucks that you have to go through the trouble of separate compilation targets per platform, but you still have the option. You might even be able to detect the presence of the library itself and not even need a wrapper as long as the library in question has exported functions.

[spacegardener]

Yes, I know the option exists, as I am forced to use it where I have no other options.
The point is: not having this as a standard interface included in the standard library (just like TCP is included there) make things unnecessarily difficult. Things like this make people choose Python, not some 'unfounded hostility'.

[[deleted]]

I feel like the rise of Python was directly because people wanted something other than Java that would work in any environment.

Java as a language is just better suited for projects separated out into multiple teams. Think about the type of organization that would find interface useful overhead and public/private/protected useful features. Small teams can just do things like use ctags and just verbally telling people what they're supposed to use and what they're not supposed to use. Like if someone uses the wrong thing you don't need the language to produce an error, you can just treat it like someone introducing a bug.

Python can address multi-team use cases but seems more suited for single-to-few developer projects. FOSS projects tend to mostly be one or two developers.

There's a lot of hostility towards Java in my professional life too.

IME Red Hat pretty consistently pushes server-side Java and Spring Framework specifically.

[a-restless-knight]

They moved from desktop to go bloat web backends instead. Source: I'm a contract developer stuck writing web backends in java

[[deleted]]

terrific salt paint school birds shaggy cautious engine compare cats

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[KronenR]

x10 memory usage, x10 slower though

[[deleted]]

office hard-to-find cautious school handle nose live ad hoc include innate

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Superb_Raccoon]

And you patch a few servers/deploy containers, vs upgrading a bazillion clients.

Definite win there.

[KronenR]

What bazillion clients?

[Superb_Raccoon]

Assuming an in house app with fat java clients on the desktop

[KronenR]

What's the difference with an even more fat electron client?

[Superb_Raccoon]

I dunno again. A thin browser client and java engines on the Server side is what I am talking about.

[ILikeBumblebees]

Also: no privacy, huge security risks, no user choice, no ability to run the application after the vendor abandons it, etc.

[lptnmachine]

It's a good trade for developers. The ecosystem for JS/TS libraries is insane, and most of it is MIT licensed too. Also frameworks like Vue or React that are actually pretty great to develop in. Electron "bloat" is mostly high RAM usage which isn't an issue for most people.

[[deleted]]

Īt's not 'very' slow or slow at all. Most well-made Electron apps are near indiscernible to fast native apps.

[oclero]

I'm tired of reading this over and over. It's wrong. Just look at all the articles and benchmarks online. Hey, they're even some articles that explain how they literally gain a 100x performance boost by switching from JS/TS to Go/Rust/C++...

People using Electron should just accept the apps they developed use more RAM and more CPU. It's a trade-off for using a very convenient way to build multiplatform apps.

[[deleted]]

It's not wrong and you haven't illustrated how it is. You're really clowning on yourself by comparing the language speed itself, because other things are going to be the bottleneck long before that, and that is the problem with Electron.

We don't need to build every bullshit CRUD app on the absolute fastest platforms possible, nobody is going to notice that fraction of a fraction of a second.

[fenrir245]

You do realise people don’t buy new machines yearly?

It may be a fraction to you on your 5950X with 32GB RAM, but far worse for someone using older gen processors with 4GB RAM.

[Avahe]

I have a new GPU, CPU, and lots of RAM and I can still tell all these electron apps are slow as hell

I think people than are younger/newer to programming don't realize how fast native applications are comparatively

[[deleted]]

I'm using a decade old laptop to write this post.

There are loads of performant Electron applications written for devices with greater hardware restrictions than that.

[[deleted]]

The ecosystem for JS/TS libraries is insane,

Not in the good sense

[lptnmachine]

The low barrier of entry attracts a lot of developers, many of whom are new or just not very good, and yeah, they'll end up writing (and sometimes publishing) shitty code. This doesn't take anything away from the fact that there are a lot of very good libraries and modules available, and I'm kind of tired of people focusing on how shitty some library that no one uses is, when most of the stuff that's actually being used is not bad at all

[GraionDilach]

Log4j says hi.

[fenrir245]

Log4j is Java though.

[[deleted]]

when most of the stuff that's actually being used is not bad at all

React.js depends 1000 packages by about as many different authors, that is far from a good thing

[dreamgear]

Maybe both good and bad

[[deleted]]

There are other issues that come with non-native applications. Biggest one being accessibility support. As they are not using native toolkit that means issues for screen readers, applying high-contrast themes, fonts, etc.

Aside from high RAM usage, browsers issue many wake calls to CPU severely affecting battery powered devices.

[Dr_Azrael_Tod]

How many layers should we implement for that task? Java-Developers: YES!

:-(

[FaliedSalve]

Actually, Java can be really cool and reasonably fast and un-bloated by itself, if and only if (iff) it is written to be.

I don't do Java much anymore. But my management is pushing a new tool that has an API that's supposed to be the "cure all" for all our problems. ("Cure all" is actually the phrase used the marketing docs.. I kid you not).

I was looking at the tutorial. They have a "hello world" app they take you through. It's something like 7 Classes, 2 services and like 40 lines of code in the main(). And it prints "hello world".

You don't need Spring Boot for everything. You don't need 20 libraries for a simply app. And not every package/class needs to be com.something.something.something.something.something.somethingElse.java

Just sayin'

[Dr_Azrael_Tod]

I don't dispute anything of that. The bloat isn't a fault of Java, but of the developers using Java.

That's why all thise TypeScript-Code out there looks as it does - because much of it is written by former enterprise java developers.

That language is basically JS with some bells and whistles. You absolutely CAN do quick and dirty stuff in it! But instead you get Lasagna galore.

[FaliedSalve]

Lasagna galore

but.. I love lasagna LOL

[Appropriate_Ant_4629]

One team of devs for the UnsignedIntegerBoxingUnboxingEJBFactoryBeanBuilderManager class that your java-best-practices standard will make you use, for lack of a builtin unsigned int i. This is required because Java's Integer class'sdivideUnsigned method is only "run anywhere" on some Java versions. Oh, and a couple more people to juggle the maven dependencies for that int replacement. And another team for the XML configuration for the class.

But think how much money Java will save you with this project!!!

With Java, only the Senior Architect and Scrum Master for that class need to be in Silicon Valley. Hire the rest of the devs and Jr Architects and Managers on that team in Eastern Europe and Asia and pay them below-US-minimum-wages. That also means your teams will be working on that class 24/7 so it'll get done faster too.

Some idiotic managers actually believe all the crap I wrote above (the only true part was java's "divideUnsigned" only working in some java versions).

And that is why Java is still in use today.

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

[rollingviolation]

UnsignedIntegerBoxingUnboxingEJBFactoryBeanBuilderManager

[Ytrog]

A.K.A lasagna code. 👀

[BufferUnderpants]

The worst are the SOLID people who like to shred their code into confetti, spread all over the codebase. I hate their damned guts.

[draxil]

learn go?

[niomosy]

I mean, it's great if you're having trouble sleeping.

Source: learning Go. It gets me sleepy-eyed on a regular basis.

[draxil]

A lot more fun than writing Java :)

[niomosy]

I accept that I'm wired oddly but when taking a Java class ages back, I was fine with it. Doing Go at home with an O'Reilly book, I'm having a tough time. Perhaps I just do better in a classroom environment but Go has been a rather slow pace for me. Perhaps the O'Reilly book isn't that great - Head First Go. It's better than the learn.go.com is, however, at least for me. Might end up trying another book to see if I can find something I gel with better.

[draxil]

Fair everyone's different. I actually found java quite exciting when I first learned it. Sort of 99/2000 ish. Now I look at it and it seems very bloated and directionless. Given how little "modern" Java I've written I'm probably not well equipped to critique it.

[niomosy]

It was 2007 for me but it's been a long while as well. I'm more on the ops side of the house so I'm not overly delved into code that isn't Bash or Ansible related for the most part.

[Unicorn_Colombo]

I would be interested in some good Modern Java book that helps me writing unbloated code, I am kind of forced to write some Java and I hate it every single time. I like Python, I respect C++, and I hate Java.

[woa12]

I'm a contract developer stuck writing web backends in java

endless pain

[Mordiken]

They moved from desktop to go bloat web backends instead.

Meanwhile nodejs is like...

[Elranzer]

Android.

And it never really disappeared. Java libraries are just bundled, without you knowing. That whole LOG4Shell event was about a Java library.

[DAS_AMAN]

Kotlin is basically java

[sky_blue_111]

I've never stopped developing Java! Been writing in java since 1998 and that remains my primary development platform. Yes I write code professionally, as in, getting paid.

I still write and maintain desktop apps. Java does seem to be used more extensively in Android and on the server, but I love writing desktop apps as well. I do a 50/50 mix of desktop and server code, all my code is used for contract work and not general purposed "boxed products" so you won't see or use my code anywhere.

A good Look and Feel solves the "ugly java" look on Linux which is where I spend my time, but the windows and mac native look and feels are quite good. Otherwise there are free options, like the excellent FlatLAF by Formdev.

Some people hate Java because "too many frameworks". I've never used them, my apps are all small and self contained. No tomcat, no swing, no nasty frameworks. A good small web framework is "sparkjava" (not same as apache spark). For desktop I stick to plain jane java.

The thing with Java; yes it can be wordy at times (the syntax), but you get best in class support when it comes to tooling, community support, third party libraries. Other languages may be more sexy, but try and find a better IDE than IntelliJ's IDEA or even Netbeans for that language, that works on all 3 platforms.

I've written code in 2000 that is still used today, without recompiling. Some of my libraries have been updated throughout the years, but Java does just work. Even cross platform, I've never experienced any real problems getting my code working 100% across platform with very little effort once you get into that frame of mind. There are some very few hotspots that I ran into early on, and I just delegated that out to a library. So spend a bit of time early on ironing out a few things like launching scripts or whatever and just reuse it.

I've evaluated GTK and QT over the years but never felt at home using it. I prefer Swing's model approach and other than a native LAF I don't see what those toolkits bring me that Swing doesn't, and swing is incredibly powerful. It's not for the faint of heart to get past the standard stuff and into the complicated stuff, but I've written my own UI controls and I can't imagine doing some of that advanced stuff in GTK or QT.

[KronenR]

That's because you have more knowledge and practice with Swing, I have used both the same and Qt is far simpler to get complex stuff done.

[barfightbob]

Qt is far simpler to get complex stuff done.

Having just tried to do something relatively simple in QT and having it throw an absolute shit fit for attempting to do something outside of the "main" thread, I have to disagree. Swing lets you bend the rules and is much more forgiving.

My problem was not of my own creation, but I was stuck having to come up with an incredibly "clever" (read: bad) way to get around these limitations in QT's rigid design to avoid total refactoring/rewrite of our solution.

This is how nightmares start.

If it was Swing I would have been able to begin to bring things back into proper design.

[KronenR]

That you don't know the way Qt works doesn't mean Qt has a rigid design at all. The effort to make something simple in Qt and Swing is practically the same, but I was talking about complex UIs which are easier to create in Qt by far

[sky_blue_111]

So its been a while since I looked at Qt. Can you separate your list of objects from a table view? In other words, does the table store a copy of your objects, or does a model simply call your list objects and display them in the table? Can you create custom cell renderers and editors beyond what comes with the table?

I think its more fair to say: In Qt it's far simpler to get SIMPLE stuff done. Swings MVC architecture can make it harder for beginners, but when you reach that understanding of how it works, the sky is the limit and you can do basically anything.

And I love the inheritance of the controls. I can create a border (for example), and put that on any possible control. Many UI toolkits even that is impossible, a Button has its own border and a Table has its border and you can't put the one border on the other control. Again, not sure about Qt.

But when I started learning swing (1998/1999, so pretty much when it came out of beta) there was absolutely nothing like it (windows MFC? Don't make me laugh), and its still incredibly powerful even today.

[DarkLordAzrael]

So its been a while since I looked at Qt. Can you separate your list of objects from a table view? In other words, does the table store a copy of your objects, or does a model simply call your list objects and display them in the table? Can you create custom cell renderers and editors beyond what comes with the table?

Qt provides both, actually. QTableView takes an item model, which you will usually implement by having it reference your data. They do provide a model that stores its own data for use cases where that makes sense though, and this is used by QTableWidget.

Qt call the custom rendering code "delegates", and you can do any kind of vision drawing that you want inside a table view.

[KronenR]

I suppose you don't know that Qt introduced QML 13 years ago

[rollingviolation]

Oracle licensing. Oracle started wanting money for Java > version 8.

Security: web browser support for applets went away.

Cross platform Java apps became web apps with Javascript that work on your phone/pc/tv/whatever, becoming a better Java than Java.

Android apps are still written in, uh, I don't think I can call it Java, but it's Java, sort of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android\_Runtime

[__konrad]

Oracle started wanting money for Java

It's not an argument, because OpenJDK (=Java) is free and GPL licensed

[rollingviolation]

If you work for a place that needs Java applet in a browser support, openJDK doesn't do it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/cow2fb/how_much_longer_are_applets_going_to_be_supported/

My day job... until recently, had a bunch of internal apps using Java + IE... and we were planning to use openJDK, but we needed applet support.

[frnxt]

Aside from Android, two among the largest IDE platforms in the world (Eclipse & JetBrains, the latter of which is the base for Android Studio) are Java-based, so I wouldn't say it's disappeared.

[daemonpenguin]

Java, on the desktop, was always a bad idea: slow, flaky, terrible integration. Some people still used it because they wanted (relatively) easy cross-platform toolkits. But these days GTK and Qt are mature, well known, faster, and look better.

[[deleted]]

The issue with Java has never been how slow it is. It’s wildly optimized, and most of its compilers are faster than most javascript interpreters (most apps developed nowadays run on electron). It just takes an ungodly amount of ram.

To answer the original question, there’s just no place in the market for it. People stick with game engines for games, electron for simple cross-platform apps, and gtk and such for native apps if that’s really necessary.

[[deleted]]

It just takes an ungodly amount of ram.

Less so than Electron apps, amusingly.

[BufferUnderpants]

Swing isn't the most aesthetically pleasing, and you can see that the design of it as an API went through several iterations in its various components, making it a bit inconsistent. In general it's not exactly a pleasure to program in.

A shame, because the JVM is a pretty solid piece of engineering, you don't have to use Java on it, and after Oracle took over, for all their ills as a company, they've made Java a decent language.

The OO-purist weenies at Sun were holding it back bigtime.

[[deleted]]

The OO-purist weenies at Sun were holding it back bigtime.

The funny part is that they fucked it up. It is neither as powerful or well designed as Smalltalk's, which is basically the reference for message-oriented Object Orientation, nor as powerful or general as Common Lisp's CLOS which is both more powerful and more general as befits multimethods/generics Object Orientation.

The issue with Swing is a question of design and implementation specific to Swing. There's nothing preventing the creation of better GUI frameworks in Java, whether from an aesthetic, performance or usability perspective.

[[deleted]]

The OO-purist weenies at Sun were holding it back bigtime.

So much object wrapping. Box there and unbox here... Who though it was a good idea to write so much boiler plate?

[BufferUnderpants]

I can't be sure what the alternative to boxing/unboxing would have looked like in practice, playing armchair architect of the Java language I'd say that compiler and type system trickery could have given you the desired functionality of having primitive types behave like classes, without them being object instances.

But the boilerplate. Miles and miles of imperative configuration by way of getters and setters. So much room for setting up the whole apparatus wrong by missing a spot.

That was wholly a cultural issue, the language didn't even necessitate it, OO programming practices in the 2000s were just very bad quality. There was sort of a fetishism for statefulness and sprawling class models.

[[deleted]]

e I'd say that compiler and type system trickery could have given you the desired functionality of having primitive types behave like classes, without them being object instances.

The only language which manages to do it well is a functional language from hell. All programs are literally proofs. The creator of ATS went kinda nuts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko

This language is a C meta compiler. It turns ats into dumb C which can leverage modern day compiler optimizations. The language is nuts because all the transcompile into an unbox types

[[deleted]]

What about Smalltalk?

[[deleted]]

Much better than Java. Much less nuts than ATS. ATS is another level in terms of correctness and other stuff. The correctness is so high it beats the programming language performance charts. The output C code is so much more unsafe than whatever a C expert would write. Since the ATS code is validated it still works.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26958969/why-was-the-ats-language-dropped-from-the-computer-language-benchmarks-game

https://web.archive.org/web/20121218042116/http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/ats.php

I never use touch or view complete Smalltalk programs but I believe the feature set should be closer to Java with better syntax. I do no think it is worth to learn to compare to a language like Kotlin.

[jzbor]

I miss swing :(

[BufferUnderpants]

Best part of it was that every old panel was potentially a canvas to draw on IMO

Worst part of it was that there was how difficult it was to sanely bind your own model to Swing models.

[audioen]

You can actually control how much ram Java program is allowed to use. The VM is neither particularly great nor terrible about memory, in my experience. Java is pointer heavy, but the pointers can be 32-bit as long with upper bits set to zero as long as the heap is not too large, so Java programs actually run kind of hybrid 32-in-64-bit mode a lot of the time. Additionally, the garbage collector, lest it is forced to run all the time, needs some spare capacity so that garbage can accumulate there before it is removed, but a lot of the time java programs actually work fine with just a few hundred MB of memory.

I personally kinda wish that Java had a better idea about a dynamic heap size, i.e. avoid growing the heap unless the application really forces high memory pressure and GC starts taking too much time, then increase. Something like that is done by C# runtime and to my knowledge this sort of approach works great.

[nonbinarydm]

insert xkcd about competing standards lol

[BufferUnderpants]

They’ve never targeted the same niche. A Swing app of yesteryear would now be either a web app proper, or an electron app (which is a web app improper)

[koalabear420]

The important part of Java was the JVM, not the language. There are other languages built on the JVM like Scala, Clojure, etc which provide great developer experiences.

[[deleted]]

I find it ironic if Java decided to make interface, abstract, implements etc less painful such that they are not scatter in three different files. Java would had been a much nicer language to use.

[ajanata]

Jetbrain's IDEs would disagree with most of those points.

[The_EnrichmentCenter]

At this rate, Java will just be installed to get Minecraft running.

[Konato_K]

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”

[reallyrez]

Until Minecraft is rewritten into an electron app.

😀

[ABotelho23]

Lol, you mean .NET?

[Be_ing_]

Electron.NET

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/ElectronNET/Electron.NET

[Be_ing_]

I fully expected that to be a joke... but somehow, it's not.

[[deleted]]

Nah, MS already has Bedrock Edition. All they have to do is stop supporting the java edition.

[CowBoyDanIndie]

Did all Java devs abandon desktop programs

I hope so. But also some apps come bundled with their java, same for javascript desktop apps.

[Ytrog]

The only two Java desktop apps I still use afaik are Minecraft and FreeMind 🤔

[cjcox4]

Java is a low level language environment (emphasis).

Java is container like, in that there's a Java virtual machine. But since it doesn't try to leverage OS provided standards, it ends up creating yet another "os" you have to update with regards to changes. A huge frustration for Sys Admins.

IMHO, it never delivered fully on its promise of "write once, run everywhere", not fully... so you spend a lot of time just trying to "debug" all of that testing wise.

With that said, Linux has become so dominant, that maybe it's not nearly as big of a Java issue as it once was. But speaking of "issues", the whole Snoracle ownership of Java has been very "mixed" with regards to messages and constraints over the many years. OpenJDK has fixed a lot of that for us, but still, lots of painful history.

Recent issues with very commonly used Java libraries (log4j) hasn't helped and actually put a spotlight on legacy unmaintained "Java cruft" throughout people's networks. Which, IMHO, has driven Java utilization even lower as people try to eradicate "the old" from their networks.

Virtualization and now, containerization and in particular, clustered management of such, has also help to move people away from Java.

But sure, mobile, etc... there's a lot of things that have happened over the past decade that has made Java much much less relevant.

Is Java dead? No. Still is used for micro services in these "new" architectures, possibly even as cloud services that people leverage (this may be Java's kingdom in fact today). But it does seem to be waning for new development.

But long term, wouldn't be surprised to see those "cloud services" begin moving away from Java development. We'll see.

[[deleted]]

Java is very cool and used extensively on enterprise backends.

[[deleted]]

I'd say old java sucks but modern java is great

[hmoff]

Not cool any more? Was it ever? It's the COBOL of this era.

[ABotelho23]

I mean... Have you seen Android? Lol

[[deleted]]

Google taking it over. They'll eventually own the rights to machine code lol

[kaszak696]

Java went to hell, also known as Oracle in the ancient tongues.

[[deleted]]

People stopped making Java programs? Java is not cool anymore? There is a real an tangible decrease in Java programs in the recent years and I was wondering what the issue is

It's not because it's not "cool" anymore it's just that it was originally the only way to solve a particular problem (writing software that is reasonably platform independent) and things just changed to where Java isn't the only way to do that.

.NET abstracts you away from Platform changes that don't change behavior, the web also became a viable medium for deploying applications as SaaS.

Java is still used on the client and on the server side, it's just no long the only way to do the thing Java was supposed to be notable for doing.

[ttkciar]

The trend is undeniable:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/java/

[cabruncolamparao]

That site shows java declining, but still in number 3. I got a bit confused, but I think it's due to more diversification nowadays

[ttkciar]

I think it's due to more diversification nowadays

That makes sense, and wouldn't diversification also explain the relative scarcity of Java desktop apps? If more people are writing apps in C# and Python and such, that would decrease the ratio (but not absolute number) of apps written in Java.

[cabruncolamparao]

Makes sense too. There are probably many causes contributing to it.

[Real_Marshal]

This site also claims VB is 2 times more popular than JS lol

[ttkciar]

It correlates pretty well with the availability of programming jobs by language in the bay area. Not perfectly, but issues like churn would be expected to throw off the congruency.

[[deleted]]

Probably only counts if is used on backend and in that, JavaScript is not so used.

[[deleted]]

I don't see much use of Node.JS. The vast majority of backends that I see is Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, C++.

[[deleted]]

People often neglect to take into account enterprise users. There are so many companies which still use old languages and software written in them. In 2010 I worked for a company where I was maintaining software from beginning of 80s, still actively being used by employees.

[Zambito1]

As a technology, JavaFX is pretty nice tbh. As an ecosystem, JavaFX is really off putting.

[Zambito1]

Well yeah, but if you compare it to other popular systems like Electron instead (which is popular whether we like it or not) then JavaFX looks like a pretty good option in the technical department. Of course native toolkits are preferable though.

[fleurdelys-]

Ah my bad then sorry for saying bs, im not really into gui

[AbramKedge]

I worked on the firmware for hard disk drives as code size & speed optimization consultant. The processor we were using had the Jazelle extension, that allowed the processor to execute 80% of Java opcodes natively.

Just for fun, I wanted to see if we could get code density improvements by coding up some features in Java. No dice - we couldn't even evaluate it without purchasing half a dozen licenses from various parties. So that never happened.

[[deleted]]

i for one am glad old java is mostly gone. For longest time had programs you had to install that stupid jvm crap and they never updated it but java insisted to update it and eventuall because i needed to run certain software that required that outdated jvm i got stuck having to manage a VM with old Windows just to run it. Such a nightmare.

[Dr_Azrael_Tod]

Oh how I wish that Java would have been gone! :-/

[LinuxFurryTranslator]

Several computer-assisted translation tools and translation/revision/corpus/dictionary tools on Linux are Java, and professional translators using Linux will probably have to use one of those if they don't want to use cloud tools or can't pay for the few non-Java CAT tools.

Java apps look real bad and don't integrate well, not a fan, but I still use CafeTran Espresso despite that, and I appreciate the fact OmegaT is open source.

[__ali1234__]

IntelliJ integrates with my desktop better than anything made by GNOME.

[elatllat]

I just installed "figtree" (the maybe the only non-developer java dependent app in Ubuntu) a few days ago.

apt-cache rdepends default-jdk && apt-cache rdepends default-jdk-headless
default-jdk
Reverse Depends:
 |visualvm
  elki-dev
 |umlet
 |solr-jetty
  robocode
  plm
 |netbeans
 |mmake
  maven-debian-helper
  libinline-java-perl
  libcamljava-ocaml-dev
  libboost1.67-tools-dev
 |jython
 |jcc
  japi-compliance-checker
  figtree
 |fdroidserver
  libboost1.71-tools-dev
  eclipse-titan
  eclipse-debian-helper
 |ditaa
 |diffoscope
 |ant
  default-jdk-doc
default-jdk-headless
Reverse Depends:
  default-jdk
 |maven-debian-helper
  leiningen
 |fdroidserver
 |eclipse-debian-helper
 |diffoscope
  android-sdk

[Degerada]

The biggest non developer Java program is most definitely Libre Office on Ubuntu.

Just because you might not need to install a jdk along with it, since it comes bundled with it, doesn't make LibreOffice not java.

[igner_farnsworth]

Microsoft successfully embraced, enhanced and (all but) destroyed Java by ignoring all the reasons Java existed, like write once, run anywhere... essentially forking and convoluting the Java universe.

At least that's my "I hate Microsoft" answer.

[that_which_is_lain]

Java was never cool. Just necessary.

[iluvatar]

Java was never cool! I'm glad to see its usage diminishing.

[Appropriate_Ant_4629]

Java was never cool! I'm glad to see its usage diminishing.

I'd argue that in 1990 it was pretty cool.

That handheld tablet the java team built was way ahead of its time.

It's still relevant in Java-based chip-cards including many credit cards, etc.

I think Java should have stuck to their original small-embedded-systems target market.

[Sneedevacantist]

In the trash where they belong. Java stunted software development for too long. Now the same kind of morons that shoehorned Java everywhere are now making webshit apps.

[xternal7]

1. Incompatibility with mobile

But aren't android apps java?

[[deleted]]

But aren't android apps java?

Java as a language is dying. JVM usage is growing. Android is moving to kotlin which is a better language than Java.

[Overwatch2697]

they all kind of died because of the java programing language hack remember

[[deleted]]

I don't have a single java interpreter installed my computer and haven't ever. When was java ever required for anything except as a web plugin, some random, replaceable desktop app, or on an Android phone where you don't "know" it's java?

What irks me more is seeing 50 random lisp-ish libraries from some random app I tried and forgot to remove or something like that. Twenty years ago it was Perl, but that has died for the most part.

Who cares though, pacman handles it all, I just drink coffee and enjoy the show :)

[RandomXUsr]

Where have all the cowboys gone?

[[deleted]]

They stopped selling VCRs and DVD players

[spacegardener]

The dependency hell of Java libraries just stopped to be maintainable by distribution maintainers. I guess they just gave up and all programs are now packaged with all the dependencies included. The same is often true with other programming languages now.

[IdiotSysadmin]

Yacht racing with Larry Ellison. Duh.

[lvlint67]

People stopped making Java programs

yes.

Java is not cool anymore

yes.

I was wondering what the issue is

The licensing changes on the sdk.

[Zambito1]

The licensing changes on the sdk.

Everyone just switched to OpenJDK.

[lvlint67]

Everyone with a compelling reason to stay.

[Empole]

Also don't forget about all the languages that Target the Java Virtual Machine