It has easy learning curve, it's verbosity while cursed upon makes it also easier to grasp the code by less-then-expert, it's performant, it has huge ecosystem, it can run everywhere.
In principle - it's just convenient in many ways.
In principle - it's just convenient in many ways.
If you take people who instead learned Python as their first language, and put them through all the ceremony that is getting "hello world" to work in Java, you're going to get a very different reaction. A lot of this is very dependent on perspective.
For the record, I also learned C++ first. I also found Java to be a breeze. And then I discovered a whole world of other languages, and learned that in the grand scheme of things, Java and C++ are actually really similar to each other. Even Python is not so incredibly different, though it is vastly easier thanks to dynamic typing.
Compare any of these to stack based languages (Forth), array-based languages (APL), dataflow/graphical languages (LabView), homoiconic languages (Lisp), dependently-typed languages (Coq), etc. There are so many paradigms that are so dizzyingly different from each other. C++ and Java really are much more similar than they are different.
And it's worth pointing out that many if not most of these, though they would probably induce shock in a typical C++/Java programmer, are actually built on top of a small set of core concepts that is probably more coherent than either of Java or C++. And this matters a lot for people who are learning truly from scratch. There isn't necessarily enough data to make any definitive statements here, but there are schools that start with e.g. Haskell as a first language, and offhand I would probably say they get off the ground faster than a lot of Java/C++ introductory courses I see.
It's one line with the official java REPL jshell. Two lines, if you want a GUI (Swing).
The only reason Java still exists is because it created a generation of professionals who only know Java, only do Java, and won't learn anything else. That group is still large enough to maintain critical mass and create new greenfield Java projects despite the fact that Java is a shit-poor choice of language for those projects today.
Also that whole "Android" thing happened.
Yeah, and Google made their opinion of Java quite clear by adding first-party support for Kotlin.
As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.
Which is good for Android developers as they crave that syntactic sugar. Unfortunately, businesses have different priorities.
>As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.
It may not have all of the syntactic sugar that other languages have at the moment, but given its new release cadence its only a matter of time before it reaches feature parity.
Somewhat nicer syntax and some functional features isn’t going to fix the wider problem Microsoft has, which is the reason for .NET core existing, I suppose.
True, .Net Core exists because Microsoft eventually realized its mistake of tieing its programming framework too closely to its operating system. But... that mistake is now in the past, for some years now.
>all the interesting things in cloud happen outside of Redmond.
We're getting a bit off-topic from OP with this, but can you please give an example of some other cloud provider's service for which there is no Azure equivalent?
I'm not referring to Azure feature line items, but rather that in the industry, Microsoft is usually an afterthought.
The innovation happens elsewhere, and then Microsoft has to themselves try and port it to Windows. If you're running on Azure, eventually you're running on Windows (yes yes, it can do Linux VMs).
We did .NET forever, and always had to try and make do with half baked adapters and integrations when wanting to use things like Hadoop or Spark back in the day, not to mention containers took forever to come to Windows.
Got tired of waiting for Microsoft or the community to port things over, just switched to the platforms and languages where this was all native. I'm sure you'll say it's better now, I've been hearing that for quite some time now, but every time I look, it's still confusing, muddled and in beta.
Kubernetes, JVM & Node.js works great for us now, and GCP is absolutely rock solid and performant.
And we don't have to wait for Microsoft to bless us with the only implementation we're ever going to get, the OSS community is much, much, more active outside of the Microsoft bubble.
Language-wise C# overtook Java quickly, but SUN was all about openness and about not being big bad Microsoft, and that resonated with the majority of idealistic developers.