[re-thc]

> So why is Java scary?

There's a lot of Internet trolls that like to bash it and influencers e.g. on Youtube that like to use it to look hip.

It's less about the facts and more about it being the biggest target they can hit.

Coincidentally their religion is called Javascript and according to them there can only be 1 Java.

[jononomo]

As far as I am aware, Java is the only major programming language (other than JavaScript, which is also the only worse major language) that was not organically adopted by programmers.

JavaScript was forced on the world by being the language of the browser, but Java was foisted on the world by Sun Microsystems in a massive marketing campaign.

And then Java was bought by the kind of person who isn't a programmer but needs to make some kind of sensible choice at some company, along with the kind of person who needs to teach freshman programming according to the latest fad.

Don't forget the millions Sun spent literally ADVERTISING Java.

For 2-3 years (2003-4?) every other tech-related book that was published had something to do with Java. I remember going into a Barnes and Noble once, back in that era, and walking down an aisle that felt like it was 30 feet long and four shelves high of just Java books. It was all marketing.

After a decade people suddenly woke up and realized "oh, Java sucks".

Then the smart kids moved on, but the rest of the world is now stuck with Java, and there will always be those kinds of people around who aren't programmers but who need to make what they think is some kind of sensible choice.

Of course, the Java community has also realized what a pile of ** Java was, so now they've added all sorts of lambdas and better syntax and whatnot, but it's band-aids on top of a fundamental misconception, which is that object-oriented programming is the best way to model software engineering problems.

[cesarb]

> JavaScript was forced on the world by being the language of the browser, but Java was foisted on the world by Sun Microsystems in a massive marketing campaign. [...] Don't forget the millions Sun spent literally ADVERTISING Java.

Also, don't ever forget that Java was the other "language of the browser". Netscape came bundled with a Java Runtime Environment, back when everyone used Netscape. You were supposed to write your web application as Java applets, with JavaScript being the bridge between the static HTML world and the dynamic Java applet world (which also explains why its name was changed from LiveScript to JavaScript).