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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

The java ecosystem is very nice. Not necessarily the language itself, but everything else. The jvm, the tools, the libraries are all very mature and good.

Skipping java and instead using Kotlin allows one to reuse all that knowledge in a great language as well.

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I guess it depends upon what you mean by ecosystem.

Java the language is ok. The culture (which is part of the ecosystem) and how you're pushed to write code is the biggest problem with Java. The wide array of tooling, frameworks, and libraries within the ecosystem is nice.

But the way you have to use them tends to be shit due to the culture surrounding the language. At least it seems to be shifting to something more sane.

Good language ought to discourage (enough) the bad practices. Culture forms slowly, and it's Java fault that the culture managed to produce such excessities as proverbial FactoryFactoryFactory.

Edit: I still think Java is a good language, especially later versions, and both original goals and recent advances are quite noble.

I somewhat agree, but Java grew up in a different era when communication about these things wasn't as easy. It's hard to change the direction of something as large and widely deployed as Java. It's happening but it will take time and its always going to dealing with its legacy as there just so much of it out there.

Huh, one needs to see first party Java libraries from earlier times. It is pretty clear engineers at Sun also believed that AbstractFactoryFactory everything will be the way world need to be rebuilt.

Of course one can show empathy and understand justifications for things they like and simply laugh out "LOL Go No Generics' when they don't.

I don’t find this to be true outside of the mostly awful, and now dead, JEE landscape.

What first-party stuff are you referring to?

I’m not sure it is necessarily dead, Jakarta EE is alive, but definitely not as big as it was.

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