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This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
No language is perfect of course, the point isn't to start a war. I don't personally use Java for my own projects anymore but I can see why it's very attractive.
This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
Java developers are cheap and easy to find. There are libraries for everything that you would need - AWS SDK, Redis, etc. Performance is tolerable and can be improved with things like Micronaut and native ahead of time compilation (GraalVM).
This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
Using the JVM doesn't mean you're limited to Java anymore, and hasn't for a long time. I have built software for the JVM for the past 6+ years nearly exclusively in Clojure with only a few moments where I needed to dip down into Java proper.
This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
It also has an ecosystem of tooling to monitor and profile built both into the JDKs and by teams across Silicon Valley (eg first class bazel support).
I’m in one of these companies now, and while I’m certainly productive using Java, it’s also got huge downside in the community which these companies don’t really care about.
Never have I seen so much cargo cult practice. The ecosystem isn’t great, with hard to google docs and everything pointing you to a poorly written baeldung article.
Java gets no one excited. And, it gets no one fired.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java is great, but here's a surprise: if (str1 == str2) { // oops }
That’s not an oops. You’re comparing pointers.
This is consistent with the rest of the language, but I'd bet one rarely wants referential equality when comparing strings.
People commenting "yeah but that's because you are a newbie / you are comparing references and you should know better" miss the point I think. I can easily see myself making this mistake while fully understanding what's going on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll try: Java is a proven, boring and "easy" language without much surprise, with a big standard library and ecosystem.
Java is great, but here's a surprise: if (str1 == str2) { // oops }
This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
There are 3rd party libraries and integrations for _everything_ and it's comparatively easy to find skilled developers with years of experience.
This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
Personally I prefer c#, but a lot of places already were using Java in significant ways before c# became good (IMO 2.0ish) and saw no reason to change.