[dpark]

We seem to have a rather short institutional memory. It wasn't that long ago (Java's only as old as Ruby) that Java was new and hailed as a savior from C++ and C. Java was widely seen as a great language, or at least a language that presented a great improvement over the existing mainstream languages. It gave GC to the masses for the first time. It delivered standard-sized primitives, an (almost) everything's-an-object design, a cross-platform runtime, JIT compilation, and a host of other improvements to mainstream programmers for the first time. Java has a lot of issues, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty good language.

Stroustrup was dead on: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." The more popular a language is, the more people will complain about it. (And the more people will build crappy software around it.)

[masklinn]

> Java has a lot of issues, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty good language.

Definitely not. Especially not in this day and age. Java has a pretty good language, java has a good ecosystem, java has a passable standard library, but in 2011 java is a crummy language.

[dpark]

Depends on what you want to do. Want to hack together a low-traffic website quickly? Java's a pretty poor choice. Want to build large-scale systems that are reliable and fast? Java might fit the bill pretty well. It's no coincidence that Google builds much of their infrastructure on Java. It's no coincidence that Hadoop is written in Java. And it's no coincidence that Twitter is rewriting much of their infrastructure in Java. Java is a good language for building Big Stuff.

[masklinn]

dammit fingers. Java has a pretty good runtime.