[twblalock]

Yep. The wordy nature of Java is just giving you more info to work with when you dive into code you haven't seen before. Java is also a lot less wordy than it used to be, and if you use the right tooling you don't need to actually type everything by hand anyway.

What matters most for maintaining large codebases that a lot of people work on is the type system and the tooling. A large ecosystem of good tooling exists for working with Java, and it is empowered by the static type system to do some very impressive things. Some of the .net stuff is probably close to that with Visual Studio and the ecosystem around it. Everything else is pretty far behind, including Python and Ruby and Go.

I know people who work on a massive Java codebase that is almost 20 years old and has over 1000 people currently working on it -- and thousands more have passed through that codebase in prior years. It's not a lot of fun. But if it was a Python codebase, it would actually be impossible.

[civopsec]

The type system isn’t impressive. You can find usages and thereby get navigation and refactoring via excellent Java-centric IDEs. But it seems like that’s it(?). On the other hand you have to constantly exercise your code because of lurking NPEs. Although hopefully we can get good annotations through third-party tooling (Facebook’s looks good).

[EdwardDiego]

I do like Kotlin's nullable types for that reason alone. At least Java has far better NPE messages now.

https://www.baeldung.com/java-14-nullpointerexception

[emodendroket]

That's a lot on its own, and being able to understand the argument and return types solely by signature is a big productivity boost compared to environments where that isn't possible.