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by TurboHaskal 765 days ago
I don’t fear Java as much as I fear its acolytes.
3 comments

Kind of a strange comment for Java which doesn't really have a quasi-religious fanbase of e. g. Rust or Python.
A comment from an alternative reality where code patterns, crazy code generation frameworks, and crazy systems entirely based on dependency injection do not exist...
Oracle had employees called Java Evangelists for a while but I think that was more than a decade ago. You never know when somebody gets their stereotypes though.

My memory is hazy but I think there may have been more of a cult of Java when Sun was in charge of things. They knew now to inspire a following.

> Oracle had employees called Java Evangelists

Well, that's just marketing department.

> I think there may have been more of a cult of Java when Sun was in charge of things.

I wouldn't call it a "cult", just normal technology hype. Yeah, it was there in the late 90s, but since at least 2010s, Java is a boring enterprise platform without much hype.

Does Java have acolytes?

It might have before, like, 2005 when it became the default “intro to programming” language. And it might get some now that Python has taken that job. But for a while it was the “minimum requirements: fulfilled” of programming languages. There’s a lot to be said for fulfilling minimum requirements but that doesn’t tend to inspire evangelism.

It is a perfectly fine language in as much as I saw, that must be why it was selected for the sad fate of being many overwhelmed students’ first language.

Yeah, since the ‘90s, and still does in this thread. They’re usually going around insisting you ignore that your lying eyes can consistently spot Java programs by their incredible memory bloat and poor performance, and that actually it has great performance (in some synthetic benchmarks).

I do think they’ve gained a little credibility now that we’ve inexplicably decided Electron is a serious platform and not an April Fool’s joke.

We just want to write code for money in peace.