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taneq

I think the reason so many people have mixed feelings about Java is that "Java" is actually several things:

- The Java language

- The Java API (and/or whatever set of libraries you're using)

- The Java ecosystem, tooling, etc.

- The sorts of work typically done these days with Java

It's perfectly possible for one person to feel strongly one way about some of those aspects while feeling strongly the other way about others.

For instance, I'm quite fond of the Java language, I mildly dislike the Java API (in how bloated it's become), I'm ambivalent about the ecosystem, and I do my best to avoid the "Enterprise Software" CRUD-churn that Java development often entails (although this might have changed, it's been a while since I did Java commercially.)

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Not a die hard java/go-or-anything entusiast, but replace the name Java with Go and you have the exact same thing.

But with Go you can iterate quickly compared to java as the compilation time is very small. This difference is massive in big projects. This is an important reason why I took up Go for many projects.

Can you give a few numbers what counts as "very small" here? Most of my big java projects take less than two minutes for a full compile and incremental compile of the whole project is usually in the range of 10 secs. If you run the whole test suite it can take longer depending on the tests, but that's not what I'd count as "compile time".

> "Enterprise Software" CRUD-churn

I did some Java in the late 90s at university, and a tiny bit in about 2001, pre-dating a lot of the enterprise stuff.

I've come back to it in the last three or four years and it's currently my main language. I think I manage to miss the enterprisey stuff. I remember J2EE happening to other people, and then for a while everything was Spring. Somehwere in there were 'Beans'

Now ... I was pleasantly surprised to come back to it. There are a lot of building blocks and interfaces to use in the various maven-centric public repositories, development is rapid, expressive (I <3 lambdas, which I never thought I'd say) and ... yeah. I'm having fun.

Part of this might be because I did (mostly) C for a decade!

If you have a strong background in both C and Java, I’d encourage you to give Go a fair shot. I also had long runs with C and Java, but ever since I’ve tried Go, it has become my favorite Swiss Army knife. Basically, it’s my default language until I have a reason not to use it.

Yeah thanks - I've been meaning to give it a go, but my personal coding time tends to be taken up more by "I want to do this" than "I want to explore this" and I haven't had the chance to use Go professionally yet.

Go and Rust are definitely on the list of things I want to learn though.

There's also: The java thing you have to install before using a desktop app that is somehow still incredibly slow and laggy even though you have a top of the line computer in 2019. At least that's been my latest experience with Oracle SQL Developer (glorified text editor), despite 20 years and eleventy bajillion dollars invested in the JVM, java is still a terrible option for the desktop.

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