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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

That's a shame. Java is my favorite language because it has the right balance of strictness (although Go is starting to take over for me). When written correctly, Java can be amazingly productive because you learn so much at compile time but the tools (IDEs) make it so that you can autocomplete away most of the verbosity.

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Java as a language is totally fine! It has everything one might need. The culture totally sucks. Oracle leads the march toward what is the "standard". Jersey is a great leap out of this.

I consider Jersey to be a good example of what is wrong with Java. Annotation driven APIs don't really lend themselves to composability - sparkframework, vertx or ratpack are much better ways of building REST apis with Java 8.

Using the annotations could probably be done a different way, but it follows many of the popular micro-frameworks like Sinatra for Ruby, or Express for Node.js.

Java lacks higher-kinded parametric polymorphism.

Java also lacks the ability to say something like:

  class Foo<T> implements ISerializable iff T implements ISerializable

So you end up having to work only with T's that are serializable, or not having the instance for Foo.

Also, Java lacks type-classes.

Java also lacks lazy bindings, and many other useful features one might need.

In short, Java is still very far from having everything one might need...

What do you mean by: "you learn so much at compile time"?

I'm a C and C++ guy, but I've done a tiny bit of Java a while ago.

A lot of mistakes are picked up before the devs can even compile their project. (Note that I did not say "you". I guess pro C and C++ coders are a lot more thoughful about their code and therefore don't that level of static checking.)

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