Java is still worth learning

I’ve been working as a backend developer for close to six years now, but reading this brought me right back to college.

Like many others, I started with C. It taught me the basics - memory, pointers, writing data structures from scratch - but most of the time it felt like I was just trying not to break things. Solving problems became more about handling the language than understanding the logic.

Then I came across Java, and something just clicked. It felt structured, readable, and intentional. Almost like reading good English. For the first time, I could focus on the actual problem instead of building the tools to solve it. Collections, built-in libraries, and a reliable runtime made coding feel productive, not just painful.

Even now, years later, Java still feels like home. It’s not perfect, but it gave me the space to learn, grow, and build things that last. I really appreciated this article - it captures that quiet strength Java has, and the care so many people have put into making it better over time. It reminded me why I still enjoy writing Java after all these years.

Spring has some compatibility shims for EE but my understanding is it’s always been its own thing and was originally formed in reaction to EE

If Java can be compiled into a single binary and have a package manager then I would learn it.

I really want to like Java, or JVM-based languages specifically, but its extremely annoying and complicated to figure out how and why thing works.

These days you'd typically use Spring Boot, which is a layer over Spring that simplifies its use significantly. As others have pointed out, none of this is JavaEE.

Frameworks like Spring are absolutely essential for many kinds of business software. Sure, there are slightly more focused alternatives like Micronaut (and Quarkus for that matter), but they tend to have more specific use cases.

In practice, teams that try to write real-world business systems without such frameworks end up with a spaghettified mess that just illustrates a variation of Greenspun's 10th rule: Any sufficiently complicated Java program without a framework contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of one-tenth of Spring.

I think you might need to look into java (or better kotlin) then. Is gradle not a package manager on top of a build system, just like npm? Is a fatjar/shadowjar not a "single binary"?