Ask HN: Is Java a wise career investment?

I have no intention of stopping. I guess my curiosity was more along the lines of whether it is worth it to dig deeper and learn more Java, or if it would be better to go for some other languages.

I'm also pondering about switching jobs for this, since the best way to learn in my opinion is to force yourself into real projects with new technologies and not just hack on some small projects for a couple of hours each week.

HN is mainly startups who need to develop code quickly and be as 'in fashion' as possible. Java is more focused on long term, reliable code. For a general idea of the 'real' popularity of a language outside of the silicon valley startup scene, something like this is a better indicator:

http://www.google.co.za/trends/explore#q=java%20developer%2C...

So it really depends on what you want to do - if you want to work in a large multinational or contact out to larger companies, then Java is a far better choice than Ruby or Python as the job demand is much higher.

If you want to jet out to silicon valley and shack it up with some guys who probably can't afford breakfast the next morning, then Ruby and Python are THE thing to go for! Not that you won't find enterprises using these languages, they're just much further apart and the demand level for these jobs is usually through the roof.

Flamebait It's still true though.

As an enterprise sysadmin, I concur that Java is focused for long term code maintenance. Reliability of the JVM is for another discussion :)

We do have Rails and other "fun" language applications, but there are few people who know how to write or debug them. Mostly it'd be the small internal teams that use it. Larger teams would still be using Java. Phone application development is a similarly rare skill, hence the outsourcing.

Besides Java, we use copious amounts of .NET. That could be another area you want to focus on in addition to Java if you want to stay in the enterprise space.

Well what do you want to do? What kind of problems do you like to solve? Then look around and see what languages are commonly used and why they are used to solve that category of problems. Then try those languages, and form your own opinion.

I personally think languages are easy to learn enough to get stuff done. API's and libraries with their uses, corner cases is much more work. i.e. the java language specification is just one little book. But once you add all the common API's and libraries and how to interact with most common systems. i.e. DBMS and networks you have a small library.

In the end you are paid for solutions to problems, so learning to understand and solve problems is the most important.

Hard to tell the future, but I'm betting on Scala. Relevant for enterprise, gaining momentum for startups, and I think has the best of both worlds.