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Comment by matdrewin | Hacker News Reader

Never understood the hate towards Java on HN. Java is not perfect by any means but every one of the other languages he mentions in that article (Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript) also has their shortcomings. People focus way too much on technology and not enough on the results.

It reminds me of a great post by Coda Hale a couple of years back where he was explaining why he switched back to Java from Scala (which was hot shit on HN at the time):

http://codahale.com/the-rest-of-the-story/

"The world has yet to take me aside and ask me for my opinion of it, and in the past few years I’ve found that it’s far more profitable to build things rather than tilt at windmills."

View on HN

I think part of the hate may come from people trying to code Java in a text editor rather than an IDE. Java's verbosity/class-heaviness really doesn't bother me at all when I'm in an IDE. OTOH, coding java in a text editor is pretty frustrating.

That's a fair point. Programming in Java was what made me move from Emacs to Netbeans. Well, at least for Java, HTML, Javascript etc.

It's an environment that needs an IDE because of the large number of libraries and the large number of features delegated to libraries rather than the core language (which is an architectural decision that I approve of, BTW)

I really respect Coda Hale for the work he has done on Dropwizard, and shares his views on Java vs. scala.

As for the java-hate - in my 10 years of java-programming it has always been there. They used to complain about it not being portable enough, not performant enough, GC-pauses, start-up times, and lately that it's to verbose and non-functional. But java has persisted, and only improved over the years. I'm happy I've been able to (mainly) program in the same language for so many years. It makes me realize just how long it takes to truly master a programming language (or perhaps programming in general). I guess that's why they say "..it takes 2 weeks to learn a programming language, and 10 years to master it". It's an art, and the language is your tool.

"lately that it's to verbose and non-functional"

I was complaining that Java was verbose in 1999.

I never used to understand it either until I got more exposure to other languages. Now I can't understand how anyone would voluntarily pick Java over other languages.

The codahale post is old news referencing issues which have already been fixed.

> Never understood the hate towards Java on HN

... it's not on HN. It's among the users to languages that aren't Java or C#.

I wouldn't put C# and Java together. The former is significantly better more often compared to Scala then Java nowadays. Java is still a great language though.

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