Comment by Mikera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mikera | Hacker News Reader

Java is a great platform to build on - and the sweet spot is definitely for server side applications like this.

You can safely ignore the people who bash Java - they are generally clueless. The Java language is perfectly fine: high performance, statically typed, OOP, relatively simple and maintainable. It may not offer the most concise code and it may not have all the "trendy" language syntax features but guess what - that actually doesn't matter much in the real world (i.e. outside the realm of language designers and fanboys). If saving a few characters of typing is your major concern when choosing a language, you have much bigger problems.

But the real strength in Java is not the language but rather the overall platform - the combination of the JVM (which is an amazing high performance feat of engineering), the library ecosystem (which is the best overall for any language), the tools (great IDEs, Maven, a host of other developer-focused tools), the fact that the OpenJDK itself and most of the libraries are open source and the portability (compiled JVM code is extremely portable, and importantly doesn't need a recompile unlike some other so-called "cross-platform" languages)

So overall you can't really go wrong with choosing Java for server side applications. Although I would also give Clojure or Scala a look - if you are after "powerful" languages then these two are pretty amazing and you still get all the benefits of being on the Java platform.

I don't think Java-the-language is "perfectly fine". It's extremely verbose, the type system is mediocre at best, it's actively hostile to functional programming (and lets not even consider anything else like logic programming!), the syntax is extremely inflexible.

Your tirade against "fanboys" is nothing but a straw man--the point of having more expressive, concise code is not "saving a few characters of typing" but making your program easier to write and easier to read (and, therefore, easier to maintain). Sure, you can get stuff done with Java, but you can generally get it done faster and better with other languages.

High-level features absolutely matter in the real world--they allow you to write code faster and give you more confidence that it is correct. Code written at a higher level is not only shorter but also more declarative and clearer. The idea that only "language designers and fanboys" care about having these features in their languages is patently absurd and rather arrogant.

To me, it seems Java is a compromise--it ignores decades of research and progress in programming language design in favor of catering to people who knew C++ and didn't want to learn something radically different. Thanks to being widely taught, it is now essentially a lowest common denominator: practically any programmer you meet will have at least learned the basics of Java at some point. But I think this is exactly the sort of compromise any good programmers should not take!

Now, the JVM is, admittedly, a good platform. It has some glaring weaknesses--poor support for functional programming, poor interoperation with native code, long start-up time and so on--but, on the whole, is very strong. Happily, you aren't bound to Java if you want to be on the JVM and you can use some of the great alternatives like Scala. But this does nothing to defend Java-the-language--having a good implementation does not make a language well-designed or particularly usable.

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