[pron]

Programmers rarely have consensus on anything language-related, but their preferences are not always evenly distributed. Our decisions re Java aim to cater for the majority of professional teams, which may not necessarily be represented by the majority of commenters on HN. If you don't understand why many more teams prefer a language with choices that appeal to you less over languages with choices that appeal to you more, the answer may be that your preferences are not the same as those of the majority of teams.

[skitter]

This is the most infuriating kind of answer: There are concrete complaints and this comment addresses none of them. Claiming that there are people who prefer Java's syntax to be inconsistent isn't useful without saying why they do.

[pron]

1. I don't agree the syntax is inconsistent at all. All Java type declarations are terminated with a `}`. Using a different terminator is inconsistent, and that's the thing that requires justification. For the time being, while records are still new, the justification of saving a single character was deemed insufficient. When it comes to inference, I also don't see an inconsistency. Inference infers types or type argument based on the available data. For example, in `var x = new ArrayList<>()` there is simply no information that can allow us to infer a type argument; on the other hand, if a method's return type is `List<String>`, `return new ArrayList<>()` can infer the argument.

2. Even if there were inconsistencies, and certainly when it comes the the concrete complaints, people not only disagree on what's a preferable feature (I, for one, strongly dislike extension methods -- and consider them an anti-feature with a negative overall contribution -- and much prefer default methods) but they also don't pick a language based on one feature or another but based on a gestalt of properties. The languages mentioned by the commenters make different tradeoffs that have significant downsides alongside their upsides (e.g. they don't match the evolution of the platform; they add implicitness that makes it harder for some to read code; they have a lot of features that need to be learned, each of which is pretty underpowered), and it seems that more people prefer the overall tradeoffs Java makes.

BTW, languages also have important meta-features. For example, every language needs to adapt over time, and the question is how it does so. The three languages that have managed to successfully support large programs that can evolve over time, maintained by changing teams -- C, Java, and to a lesser extent C++ -- have shown they take evolution seriously. They maintain compatibility and choose their features carefully (well, C++ maybe less so). Kotlin has lots of features, but it already has more outdated large features than Java because it adds features to address a certain problem and then the platform addresses them in an altogether different way (data classes, async functions), and as a result it's showing its age quicker, too. Java has proven that it evolves well, and many think it evolves better than most other languages.