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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World.

Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experiences are just as valid.

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you could say the same thing about a dozen other languages, but there is definitely a stereotypical cranky java dev that is frustrated writing corporate crud apps that should in theory be blazingly fast, but never quite are for reasons. They revel in the verbosity, and look down on anyone they feel is taking the easy path. If you've never met one you're lucky, but they've been at every company I ever worked for.

> you could say the same thing about a dozen other languages

No, you could not. You could say it about maybe four others: PHP, C, C++, and C#.

No other languages have anywhere near the userbase size while being fairly quiet when it comes to online tech discussion.

I agree there are crusty old Java devs (as well as crusty old C, C++, PHP, etc. devs). In a decade or two, there will be crusty old TypeScript devs. It's just the nature of technology lifecycles and career paths. Some people get relatively tired of learning when they get older and just want to capitalize on what they already know for their remaining earning years.

I think I made a conscious effort in my 30s not to become a crusty old Python dev. But I predict that in another decade or two, I (now in my 40s) will be a crusty old Rust dev.

ok I may have exaggerated, but there are quite a bit of people silently writing and maintaining mission critical code in Fortran, Lisp, Cobal, Perl, Pascal, R, Assembly, the different BASICs, Lua, TCL, Erlang, and the list goes on. Plus those are just the ones off the top of my head where I have personally met people doing it in the last decade. I am always shocked by how much

Most of those rarely make to the top of HN, and other generalized forums. If anything, Java and Python are together at the popular kids table and we forget about the silent heros keeping the ship afloat.

I worked in .Net land before switching to Pythonville. It's very much like Java metropolis, but with less CS graduates.

If the TIOBE index is an even remotely useful indicator, Python's an even bigger giant metropolis.

I'm not sure if they refer to how large the language's reach is, but more about how advanced Java is once you stop looking at syntax bloat. The JVM can do stuff that's not easy to do in other environments.

I recall things like updating packages/code on the fly, recompiling fast paths on the fly. Maybe that's not necessary in a borg/kubernetes world where you can just restart things and have your load balancer infra take care, or just run slower code because compute isn't that expensive once you accelerate your CPU-heavy libraries, but cool anyways.

Yes, but the difference here is that Python is talked about all the time, so the online tech world knows that Python is huge.

The comment I was replying to seems to believe Java is a tiny backwater, which is anything but true.

I read it less as "Java is tiny" and more as "Java developers can be peculiarly insular and conservative, by the standards of other communities."

Considering that as recently as 4 years ago I was working on a project where we still had a hard requirement to support running in Java 7, and this kind of thing was not considered unusual, I can't really disagree too strongly with that. Yes, that was still inside of Java 7's extended support period, so there was really nothing unusual or surprising about this, from a Java developer perspective. But that's kind of the point.

It's also not really a bad thing, considering what kinds of things run on Java. Mainframe developers have a similar thing going on, for a similar and similarly good reason.

Lest we forget that Python is ~4 years older than Java.

This is absolutely correct as someone who has worked in a few Java shops. Although, the same thing is Java's failing, as it is well nigh impossible for people external to the Java ecosystem to learn what's inside it without having work-related exposure.

You may know all this and are just singling out the Hacker News crowd. But I read your comment and thought "surely he doesn’t think Java is much bigger than Python?" I’m not even sort of sure Python is smaller.

Edit more succinct

The reason that people still code in Java (or derivative) is because legacy code that they are working on is in Java, and nobody has either the skill or time to go through and translate it. Which means that the jobs where its used are basically just big enterprise, low tech software that just been around for a while.

The Log4shell incident is the perfect demonstrator of what kind of people are in Java world.

> nobody has either the skill or time to go through and translate it.

To what? Java is still a very efficient, productive language. Updating a legacy codebase to use newer Java features would probably be good, but migrating to another language is unlikely to significantly move the needle in terms of runtime performance or developer velocity.

Most of the use cases for java are in places where network latency dominates. If Python is fast enough for Uber and Youtube, its fast enough for your service.

When you work with a codebase that doesn't need compilation, the development velocity is quite fast. You don't need to compile, you can prototype features on the fly, you can even write real time updates while the web server is running.

And standard compilation in Java is done in a VERY inefficient manner with groovy - you have groovy that gets compiled to bytecode, which then gets JIT compiled to native, which then actually runs the compilation of the source code to bytecode, and then you have a first startup latency as it gets JIT compiled to native.

All you really need to write any modern app is Python + C. Anything that needs to go fast, just encapsulate in a small C program, and launch that from Python.

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