Getting rid of checked exceptions would be very beneficial for Java's popularity. No modern JVM language has kept that annoying feature. Just stop checking them at compile time, or make it an optional feature.
Kotlin is a much better Java so that's what we use :)
I have a friend who maintains a gazillion JVM based apps for the Norwegian tax authorities and he's a Kotlin skeptic. He's pretty tired of maintaining and porting various small apps and microservices from arcane old and discarded Scala web frameworks etc. Given how locked-in Kotlin is to a single company, I kind of get his skepticism.
Brian Goetz mentions Guy Steele's 1998 lecture "Growing a language" [1]. It's worth a watch if you haven't watched it yet. It's been discussed on HN several times [2].
Java gets a lot of flack in these parts, mostly by people who don't use Java and pull opinions out of their arse, but you'd be hard pressed watching both talks and not being impressed by the effort that's going into continuously improving the language.
I really appreciate the work done to evolve Java. They seem to be able to both fix earlier mistakes (and there were many!) and new ones from happening. While I see other languages struggling with the weight of complexity added over time, Java seems to get simpler and easier even with significant updates to the language spec.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] threadI have a friend who maintains a gazillion JVM based apps for the Norwegian tax authorities and he's a Kotlin skeptic. He's pretty tired of maintaining and porting various small apps and microservices from arcane old and discarded Scala web frameworks etc. Given how locked-in Kotlin is to a single company, I kind of get his skepticism.
Java gets a lot of flack in these parts, mostly by people who don't use Java and pull opinions out of their arse, but you'd be hard pressed watching both talks and not being impressed by the effort that's going into continuously improving the language.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=growing+a+language
I really appreciate the work done to evolve Java. They seem to be able to both fix earlier mistakes (and there were many!) and new ones from happening. While I see other languages struggling with the weight of complexity added over time, Java seems to get simpler and easier even with significant updates to the language spec.