Java Is Underhyped

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The perspective of an ignorant computer science undergrad

It’s likely that you read the title of this post and thought “what is this guy smoking? Java is everywhere!” You’re correct, Java still dominates enterprise and runs some of the world’s largest mission-critical applications. But Java’s adoption isn’t what I’m talking about, I’m talking about its hype. I spend a lot of time around inexperienced programmers. And what do inexperienced programmers love doing? Getting excited and opinionated about tools like programming languages. None of the CS undergrads I meet are hyped about Java but I think they should be.

Young/naive developers (myself included) often fall into the trap of fetishizing new languages and tools at the expense of productivity and sanity. Prior to working at Halp (now owned by $TEAM), I had a nearly romantic relationship with backend TypeScript. I thought the node.js ecosystem was the coolest thing ever: I loved the idea of transpiled code, live debugging, the massive package library, and even the weird and fragmented build systems. When I actually used it in production and spoke to more experienced engineers the magic quickly faded away.

I had a irrational affinity towards the JS ecosystem because it was the hot new thing; it had hype. Reality did not live up to my expectations. Today, the wonderful things I expected from JavaScript I am currently enjoying as I gain experience in Java. I feel betrayed that hype did not lead me to Java sooner. Java is fun to write, productive, and gets an unfair reputation among new developers as a dinosaur…

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I thought it is better to use Kotlin, the better Java? :slight_smile:

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I agree @brennan , If given the choice I would prefer to write in Kotlin.
However, although I have some experience with Kotlin (not for Android development), it’s been a while since I used it and now that Java is on a 6 month release cycle maybe it has caught up with Kotlin.

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Nope. Java is getting lots of interesting new features, but Kotlin and Scala are both still significantly better, and neither are still either (though scala is more still than it really should be).

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I spent a lot of time learning Scala when it first came out but the build tool (SBT) at the time was super slow and in the end I got frustrated.
If I were to switch from Java I would go for Kotlin with Clojure as a follow up but there’s a bigger learning curve with Clojure.

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