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Java at 30: How a language designed for a failed gadget became a global powerhouse (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 44 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's a cycle all popular languages go through. First only experimental applications and super opinionated programmers use it. Then everyone wants to use it for everything. Then it finds a niche where it excels and settles.

I remember Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript going through those phases as well. Currently, everything is Rust.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I'm still wondering what Java's niche is, it seems like it does everything, but nothing particularly well. I guess it found a home on Android, but I don't think that's because it's particularly well-suited for it.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Java is still massive in corporate software. As in, internal software for corporation's day to day operations. Machinery management, inventory software, point-of-sale applications, floor management, automated finance tracking. Stuff that isn't really cool or talked much about.

    And of course there's Java's most important job. Coming up with features and syntax that Microsoft can copy and steal for C#.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The point of Java is to be a language for 90% of programmers. The vast majority of software development is not sexy, doesn't require a PhD. Java was intended to be a commoditising language and in that it succeeded wildly.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Show me an Android app written in Java, and I’ll show you the line of developers ready to rewrite it in Kotlin.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Sure, and Kotlin is largely syntax sugar for Java. It's certainly nicer, but the semantics are largely the same.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    You must not write much Kotlin then? It’s far more than sugar when a language fixes core issues in another.

    It’s a modern, statically typed language that addresses many of Java’s longstanding limitations with robust type safety, expressive functional features, coroutine-based concurrency, and extensibility — all integrated natively. Interoperability with Java is a strength, not a sign of dependency.

    Calling Kotlin merely syntactic sugar is like saying Swift is just Objective-C with prettier syntax — it misses the deep improvements in language design, safety, and developer experience.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I've written a fair amount, enough to know it's a significant improvement on Java, but that it still suffers from the unnecessary abstraction in the standard library. And that's pretty much my main problem with Java.

    Swift is a different story because the main issue with Objective C is the syntax.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Java is nothing like Rust. Java was always sold as a low skill programmer language, Rust has a steep learning curve. Java tooling has always sucked where Rust has excellent tooling pretty much since 1.0, Java is extremely verbose and needs a lot of tools to generate code to be productive at all, Rust is very expressive and most people write the code by hand or just use built-in language features. Java has a culture of "who care about that backtrace in my log as long as the app does what it is supposed to" while Rust has a culture that very much cares about correctness more than performance. Java was always driven by CEOs pushing it on people from the top while Rust is very much a language programmers try to push into their companies from the bottom.

    Also, none of the languages you listed have a very particular niche that differs from what they were used early on apart from Java which is now mostly used on the server and used to also be used in GUI applications more.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You hate Java, you love Rust, noted.

    Also:

    SAP,

    Graphics,

    Data science,

    Web.

    Good day.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes, I have Java and love Rust but the point is that if you say they all go through the same cycle there need to be some commonalities between the languages and the way they rise to popularity and there just aren't. If any modern language resembles Java's rise to popularity it would be Go.

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