[meddlepal]

Ok I'm a veteran Java developer that understands exactly what you're saying but try explaining that to people unfamiliar with Java or junior engineers and watch their brains glaze over.

The JDK is filled with a ton of dumb "once upon a time we thought this was okay..." things that don't properly encode the correct modern idiom

[xenomachina]

For a long time I've wanted a sort of "local deprecation" tool where we could have a list of things in the JDK that shouldn't be used, and any direct reference to them would cause our build to fail.

[erik_seaberg]

https://errorprone.info/ can be configured to look at the AST and warn or reject a lot of specific problems.

[cesarb]

We use https://github.com/policeman-tools/forbidden-apis for that.

[twic]

Yes, it absolutely is! But then so are all other languages of its vintage. Part of learning a programming language is learning that.

Newer languages definitely have an advantage here, in that they haven't been around long enough for people to have figured out which bits of them are dumb.