21–30 of 165 posts
It's the defacto standard language at Amazon. There's no specific requirement that teams write code in Java and all the high level infrastructure makes no presumptions, but there's great internal support for it. And Amazon hired Gosling, so interpret that as you will.
Learning another language is _significantly_ easier than learning the first one or two - not to the point of being a master but to the point of being competent.
Should I learn OCaml? Yes, you learn from knowing a functional language and Scala (combines functional and OOP well) and Clojure (a lisp) and C++ (resource management is important) and most of these languages.
Should you learn Node.js? Also yes - it is popular, most of the FE tools are written with it - it's fun to use (subjectively) and it's popular and reasonably fast.
Also Go, Rust, Swift and a bunch of other languages - languages are like philosophies and knowing them helps you understand what you're actually doing better often.
I never understood developers that only know 1-2 languages since it severely limits how you _look_ at problems.
It's sad that this is still a thing. Compared to more trendy languages like Python and Javascript, Java is very light on memory. JS is known for being fairly fast and "light", but its actually 5-10x slower than Java and uses 5-10X more memory. And the whole "lightness" of it is a lie. Javascript's run-time is probably bigger and more complex than the JVM.
Java used to be painful, but there's a ton of tools that make it easy to use if you know where to find them. Some, like Lombok, get rid of a majority of the "cruft" by enhancing the language itself. Awesome Java is a treasure trove of useful stuff. https://github.com/akullpp/awesome-java
The combination of speed, flexibility, and robustness can't be found anywhere else, Although Go is slowly catching up.
One annoyance with Java(and Kotlin too) is that it's pretty much the only language left that you really ought to use a specialized IDE with while pretty much every other language(including C#) you can get adequate support in VS Code or Emacs.
maybe consider cobol instead?
However, lots of banks are rewriting their COBOL code in Java, so you might end up writing some Java anyway.
If you want a low stress good paid job, where you would be able to rush home at 5pm, then yes. If you are looking for excitement, learn $hype_of_the_year and join a startup, but be ready to learn $hype_of_the_next_year soon.
Those aren't exclusive, you can do something exciting, join a startup, learn $hype_of_the_year and still work for a place that understands that burning out employees is stupid.
It's perfectly reasonable to work for a place that is both exciting and doesn't make you sacrifice your personal life because they acknowledge that it's bad for business.
I never got the "Should I learn X" posts. The answer is yes to all the "Should I learn X" questions so it's very hard to have a discussion. Learning another language is _significantly_ easier than learning the first one or two - not to the point of being a master but to the point of being competent. Should I learn OCaml? Yes, you learn from knowing a functional language and Scala (combines functional and OOP well) an…
Yes, we'd love to learn all the things given infinite resources.
Then you can learn $FLAVOR_OF_THE_YEAR to get you exciting gigs while maintaining proficiency in $OLD_FAITHFUL to keep you employed as you learn $FLAVOR_OF_NEXT_YEAR.
One annoyance with Java(and Kotlin too) is that it's pretty much the only language left that you really ought to use a specialized IDE with while pretty much every other language(including C#) you can get adequate support in VS Code or Emacs.
Using IDEs since mid-90's, and I used to know XEmacs quite well.