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Comment by apower | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious. Why is there such a furious hate for Java?

I know many people are put off by what they see as the paternalistic nature of Java. Trying to protect the programmer from themselves by reducing the power and expressiveness that is available in many other languages.

Why that would rise to the level of 'furious hate', I don't know. I find it hard to grasp how anyone could hate a language. Hating a job where you have to use a language that frustrates you, that I can understand- but that has an easy solution. Find another job.

For most people I talk to and for myself as well the hate is not for Java the language per se. It's for Java the Standard library and ecosystem. Java the language doesn't suck.

However java's standard libraries seem to have been designed to make you write a metric ton of code to do the simple stuff and a planets worth of code to write anything actually useful. I used to joke that someone needed to write a java.lang.{python,perl,ruby} namespace where sane people can use code to just get stuff done. Then along came JRuby,Rhino,Jython, and now Clojure so I guess in a way that's exactly what people did.

Where's the "furious hate" in noting that you're not just having to learn the language in question, but also an environment that's built around another language entirely?

Every language that gains a big following will be hated upon. Compare it PHP, which is still the most used web scripting language. Even though it has it's pitfalls it's WTF's, it still seems to recieve much more hate than it deserves.

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