[d4rkph1b3r]

>For better or worse, CS departments across the US produce Java programmers more than anything else.

Do you think this large pool of programmers are good?

>This makes it very easy to hire Java developers.

Yes, if you are looking for sub-par developers. I don't think Google thinks to itself "oh man we're so glad we use java, otherwise hiring would be challenging". No, they have just as much difficultly hiring as anyone else. I'd even say that considering it's the 'blub' language to use PG speak, it makes hiring harder for them.

>Java has stability, Java has concurrency, Java has hot reloading, Java has a good track record, Java scales,

No, those are things the JVM has.

>Java has really nice functional programming support,

You can't honestly believe this. How much functional programming experience do you have?

[autoreleasepool]

> Do you think this large pool of programmers are good?

Yes, why not? I have yet to see evidence that Java programmers are not good. Seems like a discriminatory mindset. The large pool also makes them easy to replace. I think Facebook has had an ad for an Erlang developer for a few months now. I don't think a startup needs that kind of stress.

Also, I'm sure there are Java Devi who are absolutely fantastic. That is, I think the idea of the meme "real passionate programmers use less mainstream languages" is entirely unsubstantiated. This line of thinking comes from immaturity, elitism, and a desire for validation by association.

It's just like the "the best lawyers were on the debate team" meme that's also very untrue. It sounds nice if your kid is on the debate team, though

>No those are the things the JVM has.

I meant Java as a platform. Funny, you were the only one who didn't know what it was what I meant here.

> You honestly can't believe this. How much functional programming experience do you have?

I've dabbled with Erlang and Haskell. I don't have as much functional programming experience as I would like. Also, I've only heard good things about Scala and Clojure. What was so ridiculous to you about what I said? Or are you unable to forgive an accidental conflation of Java and the JVM?

Your criticism come across as nothing more than unreasonably pedantic expectations for terminology. They either reflect your inability to use context clues effectively or your lack of common sense.

> It's the 'blub' language to us PG speak

This is a poor reason to think Java developers are incompetent. I hope this isn't the premise that led you to that inherently false conclusion.

[d4rkph1b3r]

Eh, most of my post was an emotional response because of my hatred of the java language. Your reasoning I mostly agree with.

I do agree, the JVM is a solid language choice. I also don't think going with too esoteric of a language is a good thing. Probably a little early to bet a company on Idris or Ceylon.

Still, I apologize for my tone. Let me give you purely anecdotal information about me, so you can at least see where I'm coming from with regards to my anti-java stance.

After doing java/C# for many many years, I will not do it again. I'm much more productive in Scala/F#/ML, it's more pleasant to use, and I believe the average programmer using those languages ends up being a different caliber than the java programmers.

There are absolutely good Java programmers. They just probably work at Google or Facebook and you'll be competing with Google. I would take less money (and have, though not too much less) to not work at Google because I get to use a functional language.

shrug

If a startup is using java, I think to myself 'why java? why not Scala, F#, or C# at the very least?'. Usually the answer is 'scala/F# programmers are too hard to find', but that's not really true, what they mean is they're not willing to pay the 20% premium for them. That's a strong indicator that a start up doesn't value talent.

[autoreleasepool]

> Still, I apologize for my tone.

It's all good! I've had the same heat of the moment responses on here, so I get it. But thanks anyways.

> If a startup is using java, I think to myself 'why java? why not Scala, F#, or C# at the very least?'. Usually the answer is 'scala/F# programmers are too hard to find', but that's not really true, what they mean is they're not willing to pay the 20% premium for them. That's a strong indicator that a start up doesn't value talent.

Definitely. If I chose the JVM or (blanking) the Microsoft VM I would not limit myself to the object oriented languages for those platforms. I was under the impression that using multiple languages was a given, but apparently not? I wouldn't know, I'm doing iOS right now (hence the username). I graduated fairly recently, so I can only go off of what I've read.

So, I would probably do Java and Scala together if that was possible. I really haven't looked into it. My startup was completely hypothetical.

[lowmagnet]

Might I suggest starting with Java, but moving into Kotlin after getting the basic syntax of Java down? I have a good feeling about the language after translating a system of classes to it recently. About 60% of the code vanished, and working in it let me free up a few concepts for the resulting java code after doing my thinking in Kotlin.

Most of the stuff Kotlin does, absent much nicer functional syntaxes, I can do in Java 8 already. I think Kotlin does a better job at expressing it. I especially like the first-class nature of functions, and I know I'm just in the early days of understanding it.

[d4rkph1b3r]

Why kotlin and not scala? Kotlin is like Scala--, in addition to not really having a job market.

[foxylion]

Some true words.

The programming language has really nothing to do with the quality of a developer. A new language is learned quickly, software engineering skills not.