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Ask HN: Do you as a Java developer hates Java?

7 points by robertwt7 ↗ HN
I'm not a Java dev, but my current company uses it as its core. I found it okay-ish, verbose but I don't mind it (I've worked a lot with node and laravel before).

Many questions have been asked about this years and years ago (there's 1 popular in reddit). However, stackoverflow insights 2021 still shows 52.85% (15,413 responses) of Java dev hated Java. Do you guys hate it? and why?

10 comments

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lizadiam
I've been programming Java for about 10 years professionally. I think most of it stems from the fact that JavaDev work is nothing really groundbreaking - it's mostly work for established companies. No startup is building their new exciting app in Java. That makes Java work good money, but a hard slog to get motivation in
gerardnico
This guy's didn't try to write data processing in a dynamic language it seems ;)
croo
Nah, it's a great and developing language, fast, mature, best ecosystem ever, great and mature build tools, established standards, great documentation. It is verbose but not bloated anymore (and any bloat can be handled by your favourite IDE or Lombok)

One may hate frameworks like J2EE, Spring, whatnot. But the language itself is better than ever.

beardyw
I always felt Java was a good enough language which wanted to be a great language. I felt too little attention was given to making coding straightforward and concise.
ravedave5
I work in both Ruby and Java. I dislike how loosy goosy ruby is, but wow it's slow to write Java. Asking same or similar developers to do the sam-ish tasks in Java seems to take 50-100% as long. That said I trust the output of the java better as there's less "magic" occurring.
muzani
Yes. It's great for making maintainable code, but what I want is hackable code.

It's also really verbose. Kotlin rips out all the verbosity at no cost. Why would I want "@Nullable" when "?" does the trick?

Javadocs are a major code smell too. Why do I need a 8 line comment for a 3 line method?

I think it's more a problem with the habits that have grown around Java.

avmich
> Yes. It's great for making maintainable code, but what I want is hackable code.

Java can be very hackable. Fluent Java, lambdas, generics provide opportunities.

> It's also really verbose. Kotlin rips out all the verbosity at no cost. Why would I want "@Nullable" when "?" does the trick?

Just omit it altogether. If you really want, you can prevent nulls on another level.

> I think it's more a problem with the habits that have grown around Java.

Yes. Java was nearly dead, but 8th version significantly improved things. But the biggest problem is frameworks and dragged baggage of EE-style development from early 2000. Lightweight Java is very different, while with its own set of issues.