I'm curious, given nowadays we have many progressive tech options to adopt, why would anyone choose Java and what considerations are taken into that decision.
Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
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Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#2I think there are a number of reasons why you would.
- Built on top of the JVM
- Large number of 3rd libraries, i.e. Jackson, Jetty, Spring Boot, Hibernate, etc.
- Mature, can find support in numerous areas
- Dependency management, I'm sure many will disagree but I've found Maven to work well enough for what i need it to do both from dependency management and releasing
- It's the language I'm the most efficient with and if I'm building something brand new I favor speed of iteration over having to stumble over learning a new language. NOTE: I'd say the same thing about C#, Swift, Javascript, etc. If that either of those were my primary language I'd do the project in that because speed is your friend when starting out.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#3I think there are a number of reasons why you would. - Built on top of the JVM - Large number of 3rd libraries, i.e. Jackson, Jetty, Spring Boot, Hibernate, etc. - Mature, can find support in numerous areas - Dependency management, I'm sure many will disagree but I've found Maven to work well enough for what i need it to do both from dependency management and releasing - It's the language I'm the most efficient with…
On the library front too - plenty of companies offer a Java SDK.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#4It depends upon the application and its usage that is being developed.
Java has stronger compile time checks than many other languages. The JVM supports several other languages. For long running processes the warm-up time experienced with JITs might be of minimal concern.
A critical skill is to sufficiently understand the incompletely defined application in order to choose the most appropriate language(s), framework, environment, infrastructure, tooling. Of course, the experiences and competencies of the development team should also be taken into consideration.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#5As much as I love java and jvm as a piece of CS art and my first professional experience — I would see not a single reason to prefer it in 2022 to other alternatives.
Except maybe some infra constraints related to big data or legacy systems interconnectivity.
In the worst case scenario I would stick to JVM, but not to Java language.
Main reason — poor dev experience (for 90-s it was awesome), far outweighed by modern “light” alternatives, like node, go, ruby, python etc.
And dev perfomance is #1 factor of any project’s success/failure. On account that even lowest salaries are magnitudes higher than cpu/memory costs.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#6It depends on what you're trying to do. Front-end Java (applets/webstart) is dead. But on the server, or even some embedded devices, Java is working fine.
I'd like to ask 'why not' - Java is supported, fast enough for lots of applications and a great ecosystem of third party libraries.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#7Absolutely. The reason is that whatever you throw at it, it'll handle it well. The technology won't get in your way and will scale in just about every meaningful dimension.
Use java until you just can't bear it. You may get bored of it, we are humans after all. Ill even claim its desirable to build enough experience to be bored of it. Ideally, by this time you'll have developed the skills needed to evaluate a technology for adoption. At minimum, use java until you have learned this skill.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#8I don't know much about the language, but the JVM is absolutely a tremendous platform. Probably the best JIT compiler and GC for server workloads - by far. Great concurrency story (and may become the absolute best when Loom ships). As far as dynamic [0] languages/platforms are concerned, I don't think anything comes close to the JVM. Or even tries to [1]. It's best exemplified when straightforward JVM ports of other languages easily outperform the original. Graal's nodejs can match, sometimes outperform, even V8 performance - which is probably the other most sophisticated and invested-in dynlang runtime. I believe some ex top hotspot people are working on V8 too, so definitely no lack of expertise there, it just takes a different approach. Given the popularity of node, I have to assume tuning it to optimize for server workloads must not be easy.
[0] as in not-statically-compiled, Java may be statically typed but the platform is very dynamic
[1] CLR/C# perhaps, but don't know too much about it, I believe its approach is less dynamic and more ad hoc, it can do some things better but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
#9I am about to do so. Truth be told I am angling for Kotlin over Java, but I wouldn't be unhappy if it went that way.
Java has come a long way, 17 has a lot of nice language features and Amber, Panama, Loom, Valhalla are all doing great things for the JVM.
There's also the excellent ecosystem, and some of the Kotlin libraries have quite nice APIs.
I think tooling is a plus too, Gradle is a flexible and extensible build tool. I've also been experimenting with Graal, I'm not committing to using it, but it does look very promising (and has an easy to use plugin for Gradle). We could use it to build some very slim Container images, if it works out.
Re: Ask HN: Would you start new project in Java?
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