Java's Continued Relevance

May be I am living in a bubble... it's always hard to tell from inside the bubble. But this is not my impression at all. All of the major tech companies have major Java footprint which is not going anywhere. This is not only the older tech companies (FB, Goog, Amazon etc.). Even newer companies like AirBnb, Uber rely heavily on Java. Startups often start with fancy esoteric languages but eventually do come around to java/c++/python once they need to really scale. I am not sure wha

You're trying to make the point that the only companies using Java are doing so because of legacy. That is demonstrably untrue. Netflix and Google have had ample time and capacity to replace Java, yet they didn't.As any good engineer, people working at those companies recognize that Java, Golang, Rust etc. are all tools and these tools have their place in different scenarios.I used to be like you, but my personal "anti-language" was PHP. I would talk down on organizatio

I am.Some companies have a lot of tooling made for and internal frameworks built in Java. It would be a lot of effort to rewrite all of that in another language, and also a lot of effort to just forego all these goodies and implement them myself. In the end I'm getting paid to ship a product.Sure, Java is not "cool", and new devs fresh out of university might prefer something else, but let's not forget that modern Java is nothing like the Java that a lot of people used

Absolutely no on Java. Even if the core language has seen improvements over the years, choosing Java almost certainly means that your team will be tied to using proprietary / enterprise tools (IntelliJ) because every time you work at a Java/C# shop, local environments are tied to IDE configurations. Not to mention Spring -- now every code review will render "Large diffs are not rendered by default." in Github because a simple module in Java must be a new class at least

No, I never noticed that. It's weird how everyone in the startup community hates on java, when it's probably the most popular language in use today (source: SO tags) - far outstripping trendier languages like ruby, python, erlang, go, or this seemingly insatiable desire to re-write every framework in javascript.It seems to me that the number of third-party OS libraries and frameworks available in java, both in terms of breadth and state-of-the art, far outstrips the resources available in oth

Hacker News is very biased towards the cool new thang. But if you look on StackOverflow Developer Survey 2022, Java is one of the top languages that professional devs actually use in their day to day — far more than Go, Rust, Zig, Elixir, and so on, the more trendy languages that get talked about a lot.The main advantage of Java in my mind is how old, mature, and stable the ecosystem is. Everything has a library for it.Also, if you later decide to use a cooler/more expressive language

Lots of reasons:1) Everyone knows it or has touched it. Walk down a street filled with developers and you'll run into many who know or have worked with Java.2) Apache. Apache. Apache. The saying goes No one ever got fired for using Java / no one ever got fired for using apache. Most major apache projects and libraries are Java/JVM based and the Java interface provides the best way to interact with them. Don't underestimate the pull from Apache on language choice.3) L

Java is still ok. A lot of people use it. It's a good ecosystem and well hung technology, the tooling is very good.However, I think Java is not very popular because of Oracle and the licensing. There is no good reason to avoid it technology-wise but it has kind of a bad smell.Another reason could be that more and more modern languages are trying to prevent using a VM and are designed as or transition into a compiled language offering "best" performance by having native binar

Had a good run? Java is still huge.

Yes, "mature" would have been more accurate for Java, some exaggeration on my end. I was trying to convey the sense of excitement for new projects and developers in Java but it is not fair to Java to be compared to COBOL. Primarily because Java is actively developed, lot more developers etc. Nevertheless Cloud is so big nowadays that people are looking for alternatives to the JVM world. 10 years ago it would been a close to default option.