Pitch me on Java

Hi All! I am recruiting for Java,C# and C++ roles fully remote if anyone is seeking a new role or looking currently!

My random impressions:

java community - bureaucratic over engineering
python, ruby, node community - under engineering
go community - enough engineering

clojure, scala, haskell, rust, elixir - more elegant, enough engineering

One of the pros could be that if a senior developer leaves you can almost get anybody to continue the proyect

Pros

• Type-safe: design and modelling, compile-time errors, IDE support, etc
• Huge ecosystem: frameworks, tools, libraries, documentation, support, etc...
• Reliable: developed and supported by industry-leading companies
• Fast and stable on different workloads
• Still in top of jobs vacancies
• Medium entrance level => (mostly) experienced engeneers in your team

Cons

• Oriented mostly to backend development, almost is not presented on frontends
• Not so modern and contains a lot of legacy stuff, however the language is still now in active development of new features
• Verbose: standard design patterns require a lot of boilerplate code
• Memory consumption (there comes some optimizations like project valhalla)
• Slow startup and "heating" time (may be critical). May be solved withcompilation to native code.

Ok Ben, let's say you've never touched Java. Which may imply you are an aspiring developer looking for a way to prove your competency. Java provides that pathway to proven competency by its certification series. You study and take an exam, you pass and hang a badge on your social media profile. You become proficient and build a portfolio. And then you showcase it to potential clients. Proof of competency taken care of.
You also learn object oriented programming. You learn about code reuse, inheritance, polymorphism which may be a novel approach to developing applications to you as an aspiring developer. Many educators of Java programming make their case for Java by comparing it to its predecessors C and and C++, so you get to learn about other languages along studying Java.
Number of job openings for Java developers might be an incentive to you as an aspiring developer to take the path of learning Java.
I will deliberately skip on arguing for Java on a technical level, that discussion won't have an end/conclusion. Pick a tool that'll do the job, and if Java can do it or if you are paid to use Java to do that job and you already are an accomplished developer with expertise and experience under your belt, nobody would have to pitch it to you.
Now for those of us learning Java just because, its platform-independence feature might look appealing. Execute the same code on either Mac, Linux or Windows, that may draw you in. Java, just by the fact it has been in use for so long, has built itself a steady following and a ton of documentation, it has been around for decades. Plenty of how-tos on the web regarding Java, if that is your chosen path to learn Java. Which then begs the question: once you think you get proficient with Java, what's the next step? Multiplatform feature has much less of an appeal now with the prevalence of cloud computing and the clear win for the platform agnosticism. Use Java for web apps like ye olden applets? Many other tools now exist much better suited for that task. Data science? Again, much better suited and better built tools exist for that field. IoT? Embedded systems programming? Those are yet more dead ends for Java.

Can i do a half-pitch?

Learn enough java so you can read and understand it, then learn Kotlin to write your own tools.

Java is verbose and clunky, but it has decades of tools, programs and libraries done and availiable, most of them open source.

Since Kotlin can use any java library and compile to JVM bytecode, you keep access to all the millions of developer hours Java accumulated while still using something lean and concise to write your own code

Hi there fellow Devers.

I wrote a must-read Dev article recently on why we should all learn Java

click here at dev.to/rickdelpo1/why-would-i-want...

highlights

1. we can learn just a little bit of Java
2. it is a segway to SQL (acquire 2 skills by studying 1)
3. beginners can be educated on REST api and JDBC quickly (fundamentals of request, response, get, post and hosting)

Disclaimer: I am a card-carrying member of the Boring Technology Club and my pitch might sound a bit like "nobody gets fired for buying IBM", but Java is a total work-horse.

It is not pretty. It is not best in class. But it is solid and has you covered. But you can draw from a vast pool of resources, have plenty of software engineers with experience to hire, there is an abundance of libraries. Its ecosystem is mature. All the stuff that makes you productive is in place.

I build software for hospitals for a living. I like to sleep well. I use Java.

Pros:

• fast
• much tooling, big ecosystem, especially for enterprises
• suitable for big projects
• brought us the JVM (which now is the base for many more languages)
• tiny native binaries with little memory consumption are possible

Cons:

• its OOP approach has spoiled so many developers
• verbose syntax, especially for some creational design patterns
• sometimes still memory-hungry
• trademark is owned by Oracle
• desktop app development is problematic (e.g. several competing UI toolkits)
• java-in-the-browser once was a thing, but has died
• take a look at Kotlin, it might be the better java

If you learn Java, you will become a good developer in any technology stack you want. It is strict, verbose, has a fixed way to do stuff. It has strict guidelines about coding styles. All these extra lines of code that you type to configure things, the lack of behind the scene magic, will enhance your concepts to a point that it will become a second nature for you. And then, when you work on any other tech stack, these basic skills will become foundation of your work.

In India, recruiters prefer students with java background, Not necessarily because they work on java stack, but because they know that these students will have a clear concepts, and can easily learn to work on any stack they are provided with.

I have personally experienced, that students who just learned nodejs, were not able to architect their apps in a scalable manner, Few of them don't like typescripts because they think strong typings doesn't have much benefits. They have excellent understanding of JS, and their frameworks, but can't transfer their knowledge on other stack if needed.
The students who had java as their background, it was their second nature to know how to split code into meaningful, reusable modules. They name their functions in a meaningful way. They write docblocks. And they can easily transfer and translate their skills to any stack they are given to work with. Node, PHP, Go, Dotnet.

Probably what you abhor is the verbosity - that got quite a bit better with the most recent version(s), but still ... there's also a culture in the Java world of being in love with 'patterns', with layers upon layers upon layers, and with over-engineering in general ... I worked with Java for a long time, but for me moving to other languages and ecosystems was a breath of fresh air.