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Comment by ticviking | Hacker News Reader

I work at a medium US university and I can say that the thick java stacks and waterfall is a huge part of the sources of headaches in my job.

I've got my team quite agile for a Uni development team but we still face lots and lots of problems with FERPA(US student privacy rules), and trying to work with much less agile internal teams. Most of the rest of the local developers are 40-60 and very resistant to any kind of change. (seriously using .net instead of java was hugely controversial)

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Could you or the parent express what you dislike about backends written in Java? I think there tends to be a pretty negative stigma associated with it, but I haven't really seen why. Personally, I've worked with both C# .Net and Java backends, and it's really a horse a piece. Is performance the issue? Security? What is the general dislike of Java about?

I was just saying it off the cuff as sort of a comment on giant waterfall departments that never create anything great or effective. I don't really have any hate for Java and there is a lot of great software created with it (J2EE was my intro to IS development), just the kind of culture and staff it attracts in this sector. Everyone is in their cubical doing java never innovating anything with no care in the world to ever break out of the status-quo. When they do hire new staff it is usually someone who has been doing that Java at banks or for the government, for 5-8 years and it just continues. Then these people move up into the more senior positions and help cement the culture. Being on more of the web-side it is just frustrating.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with this explanation though.

You both raise fair points. I do think the community is typically construed that way, and it's probably accurate to say that a lot of the older Waterfall devs would be a part of that community (or C/C++).

In my experience .Net has a very similar set of problems and cultural issues, so if those are the two you're comparing, I'm not surprised you don't see much difference...

Depends on the parts of the .net community a lot. There's some really nice parts of the Java/JRE community too so it's not like it a function of the language, its a function of the organizations choosing the languages.

Java is a pretty nice language, it's the Java old-school waterfall java developers that bother me. Our IT development unit is a slow dinosaur waiting to be eaten up but no native competitors.

I've waited months for a bug to be fixed because it "wasn't in the schedule". Theres a kind of "sealed lab" mentality where they hold a bunch of meetings to get stakeholder views, and then disappear for 3-4 months and come back with some 1/2 working software that I could have(and a few times have) knocked out as an alpha in 3-4 weeks.

It's the worst aspects of people being "enterprisey" with people who have no performance or profit pressure so they're able to put out crap and if it's better than nothing the admins accept it.

I think when people pick a bone with Java, they are really talking about the community, not the language. To generalize, the Java community is seen as enterprise-y. They often like process and unnecessary complexity.

> seriously using .net instead of java was hugely controversial

Was this for a server app or the client side? Because for a server app, I can't imagine any circumstance where this would make sense, since the two are so similar anyway.

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