Good tooling, easy to understand, unambiguous? Sounds like Java.
Why can't people just use Java?
Why can't people just use Java?
True it's unfair to blame Java alone for these, because client side is more difficult-- we've been searching for solutions for decades in a variety of languages.
Modern front-end is a mush of dozens of tools/contexts, etc. Way more complex than TeX, and way less reliable and with minimal debugging context. But as the Eve guys have said, we're using the same layering of precompilers and interpreters we've always done. It's a mess because it's not just Java (or Python or Ruby) it's CSS HTML JS XML JSON, and the whole rest of the alphabet soup.
It's about time we reconsider platform as a whole again rather than merely a sum of fragments. That's why I find Eve interesting.
I get the hate from the frameworks craze, but if one is in a position of being forced a crazy bloated framework without recourse that's not Java fault.
apart from that, you can debug servers the other side of the world with ease, hot replace code as you execute it, walk the heap with a lot of different views available, it has recently got top notch profiling, a sane injection and inversion of control framework which you can still debug at runtime, all the libraries you can dream of and bridges to hardware for the most demanding tasks.
To be clear, I still work at a company which is extremely forward (in averyting in beta sort of way). But still these old values hold everyone back and cause endless discussions of frameworks, processes and control structures vs creativity and speed.
I don't have a beef with the language, it is the developers who have never programmed in another language and still think that FactoryBuilderImpls are a good idea. They have never ventured outside of an IDE, but insist that Python isn't a real programming language. I can program Java but I never want to program with "Java developers" if I can help it.
That said, people with a strong preference for a particular language are comparable to religious fanatics. A good engineer doesn't let language preference and emotional attachment to something get in the way of building something better.
If learning something else is too uncomfortable or seems unecessary to you then you are no better than a religious person.
btw, before I get downvoted the "religious person" analogy was what a senior developer said of me when I was a .NET guy a long time ago.
note: the same applies to the religious sects who worship libraries and frameworks (Mostly front-end Javscript web developers)
I'm a Zend-Buddhist.