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Discussion on: Java 15 in 2020: Reasons to *not* use Java?

 
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Peter Ellis

Thank you, it's good to here that things are improving on the packaging front.

With JavaFX, while I really liked working with it, its weird half-in, half-out status it had for a long time was a big mistake in my opinion, and put many developers off. It still felt a bit clunky at times (could be that I wanted to do clunky things though), then again, if I had to write a thick desktop client now, it'd probably be my first port of call.

The JLS is of course well defined, the problem is that its complexity explodes with each new major feature bolted on. Now, I used to dig into the JVM on a fairly low level, so maybe this affected me more than most, but it was hard not to notice how the number of compiler bugs went up, signalling that leap in complexity.

The problem of course arises not from the new features, which are all fine, but from the need to maintain backward compatibility, so historic compromises (like the covariance of arrays) have to be tiptoed around. As I said, it's a double-edged sword.