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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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[–] 12 points 1 year ago (11 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 (2 children)

    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* (3 children)

    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 (2 children)

    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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