[delusional]

I think it's partly a culture thing. Java developers love indirection, and they're used to an ecosystem that doesn't want to be understood. An ecosystem that wants you to google whatever obtuse error message it decides to spit out, and paste whatever half thought out annotation some blog post spits back, into your code to make it work.

I've worked with people who considered anything that wasn't programmed with annotations to be "too advanced" for their use-case.

[hot_gril]

Java is on life support as a language, but the ecosystem is strong, that's why it has all these weird features via annotations. And people who use Java are just trying to get stuff done like everyone else.

[kaba0]

How is it on life support, when it’s by far the biggest server-side language, running basically every top companies’ business critical infrastructure?

Also, annotations are just metaprogramming, which can be tastefully applied.

[hot_gril]

Like I said, the ecosystem is strong. The language's design hasn't aged well, so nowadays any Java code I see in prod has 1-4 annotations above every class and method to get around the limitations of the language. Similar to how some C code will rely heavily on macros.

[kaba0]

That’s not due to the language, but due to the business domain (I assume web development). In this domain almost every framework, regardless of language, will heavily use metaprogramming, see django, etc.

[hot_gril]

Javascript and Golang didn't need metaprogramming for this. Some of this has to do with not adhering to the OOP-everywhere model. Where's the metaprogramming in Django?

[za3faran]

Java is doing quite well.

[kaba0]

What an idiotic comment.