I understand why Java has to keep on chugging along, but I feel bad for the people that have to be a part of it. It's like watching people keep coal trains going while people are moving to cars. Why? Besides being owned by Oracle, which is enough of a reason to never use Java ever again, it's also lost the niches that brought it into existence. Java no longer runs everywhere. Java on the web is dead, and you can now…
So far I did not find anything comparable to replace Java for website server language. Go is a terrible extremely verbose language without vital features. JavaScript on Node is limited by single-thread and JavaScript itself is a terrible language (along with other dynamic languages like PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby). Rust is awesome, but I don't think that it'll be ever usable for mediocre developers, therefore it can't b…
You know, I used to think that languages had a single axis of Good. And each language sat at a certain point in that one dimension.
After several years each of experience writing large web applications using C++, Java, C#, JS, Python, Ruby and Go, that mental model of languages being good, bad or terrible seems incredibly naive now.
But overall, if someone were to ask me to write a web app today, I would probably use Python server-side and break it down into microservices. Client-side, probably just pure js + HTML5 APIs.
Why? Because I don't have the time to argue about languages being better or worse. I am too busy writing code that does useful things.
In a high-skill rockstar team, dev time is by far the most expensive resource. In a startup environment, using your dev time wisely is the difference between a unicorn and a failed business. Nobody gives a fuck if your route handler executes in 1ms or 20ms. I'll gladly pay the 20x hosting costs if that will get my feature out to customers a week earlier.