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by japhib
1223 days ago
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Hacker News is very biased towards the cool new thang. But if you look on StackOverflow Developer Survey 2022, Java is one of the top languages that professional devs actually use in their day to day — far more than Go, Rust, Zig, Elixir, and so on, the more trendy languages that get talked about a lot. The main advantage of Java in my mind is how old, mature, and stable the ecosystem is. Everything has a library for it. Also, if you later decide to use a cooler/more expressive language, you can actually keep your Java code and use one of the other popular JVM languages with interop. (Scala, Kotlin, Clojure) |
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One challenge here though is that many of those libraries are no longer maintained because the original developers moved away or retired years ago. I have a couple of relatively recent projects which require significant maintenance work dealing with unfixable CVEs or forced major updates which require non-trivial migration. That meant that even using an active project like Solr or Keycloak requires a surprising amount of maintenance developer time.
I don’t think we’ve fully gotten used to the changing supply chain trust situation in open source, and that’s going to hit all of the old ecosystems the hardest.