[smaudet]

Agreed.

I still feel like the author is missing the forest for the trees. Bash is not great to write e.g. a red black tree in or do complex image processing, but you don't have to maintain a Java install, download libraries, or setup an editor with an LSP (and really, calling java script.java 10 asdf? Why do I need to invoke Java at all? At that point, I'm probably going to wrap it in a script anyways...)

Python has its own issues but it's a small, embedded install that you don't have to accept 5 different licenses for and worry about it being able to get the same version...

And bash? That's what pacman -S jq is for - anything I can't easily do in bash or batch I just offload to a small utility written in python or rust.

Java is, at it's core, just too heavy, IMO.

[gf000]

pacman -S jdk-openjdk, this is the reference java implementation and it has the exact same license as the Linux kernel. And java has never done such a breaking change as python did.

There is also jre-openjdk-headless, for 140 MB. How is that any different than Python?

This "java too heavy" is like 30 years out of date, if it has ever been true.

[smaudet]

Quick check via msys2:

"error: target not found: jdk-openjdk"

> And java has never done such a breaking change as python did.

I'm not really sure that's true? Java 8 to afterwards, there are breaking changes that mean a lot of old enterprise stuff can't easily move forward, or worse, bytecode incompatibilities mean source-code-less stuff can't be used anymore...

The whole thing about Graal is mentioned almost as an afterthought, my point is that the language etc. is so poorly designed as to be prohibitive to interface with unless...well you're on Java. Yes there are bridges etc, but a big point of the shell, bash, etc. is easy interoperability between many programs, etc.

Java is still today stuck in a mentality of "it doesn't exist if its not in Java", which is why yes, 30 years later, it is still "too heavy". Assuming you are the effective Operating System is an extremely heavy assumption.

[smaudet]

> and it has the exact same license as the Linux kernel

Also, I neglected to touch on this point more, perhaps license is not the right word, as much as distribution - I don't know if you have ever tried building the JDK (not simple), or worked with the official JDK vs the open one (not the same functionality), or tried to access old versions of the SDK on the official websites, or had to deal with their installers, etc.

Giant headache and all around.

Not to mention, even if your pacman command works, this is still simply not comparable, the example I used was for installing a jq binary because JRE simply doesn't include this functionality by default...

And now you need the overweight pom/gradle mess to interface with the Java libraries because <insert technical debt reasons here>

[gf000]

The official JDK is the OpenJDK for several years.

Under Sun there were differences, but Oracle open-sourced every last difference and now there is only some Oracle branding logo as the only difference (and maybe some tiny proprietary codec, but your code will run on both the same way).

[fijiaarone]

Some people write programs that do more than simple scripts