Stop hating Java

I think a lot of the Java hate is because of the architecture astronauts who hijacked the language in the last decade - J2EE/EJB, the GoF, FactoryFactoryFactory shit and so on. I remember seeing the earlier versions of the servlet API and it was very elegant and well designed; unfortunately once the astronauts were through with it writing Java web apps became such a form of mental torture (Struts, anyone?) that even PHP was a welcome relief, let alone Rails. My hate for it came from having to use some shitty app server like WebSphere because the coding-averse CTO considered it a "standard".<p>Looking at more recent work such as the lovely Play framework and the influence of new JVM languages such as Clojure and Scala, it looks like things are improving in Java-land. It's still a bit dated and clunky compared to Ruby and Python (let alone Clojure/Scala or even Groovy) but it's not as bad as people make out.

First, let me point out that once again we are comparing Java - a runtime, a language platform and an entire ecosystem comprising many frameworks - with Rails, a specific web framework designed with a specific philosophy (opinionated defaults that work in 90% of cases, YAGNI, etc.) for a specific range of uses ("rapidly prototyping a small-to-moderately sized web site").<p>So just because Rails developers hate something doesn't mean it's generally evil. It might just be wrong for Rails. Many things are; otherwise Rails would have no texture. Saying no to things is what design is about.<p>Now let's talk about hate. Everyone hates something. There is nothing wrong with hating things. Hate is just personal taste turned up to eleven. You should strive to hate politely and with grace, to realize that other people love the things you hate and are nonetheless human, and probably even smart. And you should strive to remember that there's an important difference between the things you hate and things that objectively suck. Java, for example, does not suck. Not always. Lots of work has gone into it. Lots of Java-based tools are essential. There are big classes of problem for which Java is currently the best solution.<p>Nonetheless, I hate Java. It is a handy mental shortcut, one that has yet to lead me astray. My belief is that the problems for which Java-the-language is the solution are problems I don't want to work on, and that I don't have enough time in my life to address the problems I <i>do</i> want to work on, so I should simply develop a Java allergy that kicks in whenever I see the generics syntax and that causes my eyes to water until I flee towards fresh air. It works well.<p>(What's sad is when you find yourself hating something that <i>is</i> smack-dab in the middle of a set of problems that you want to work on. Hello, PHP! This requires a much richer set of coping techniques than simple allergic avoidance.)<p>(And, of course, Java is not just a language, and JRuby appears, from the outside, to be awesome, and my curiosity about Clojure is rising, so I may soon temper my simple hatred of Java into a rich melange of love and hate. The stuff of which novels are born, really.)

All you need to do to experience this first hand is go to one Ruby meetup. The roundtable introductions at my local Ruby brigade are often seasoned with AA-like declarations of soberness such as "Hi, I'm So-and-so and I've been Java-free since 2006." As a Java pro (and someone who really does like Java) it's a little disheartening. On one hand I know they don't really mean to belittle the technology that pays my bills and feeds my family, but there's a definite mindset of superiority among some professional Ruby-ist communities.

<p><pre><code> "Refactoring came to us from Java" </code></pre> Maybe the word came from the Java community but people have been carefully restructuring code since code was invented.

We seem to have a rather short institutional memory. It wasn't that long ago (Java's only as old as Ruby) that Java was new and hailed as a savior from C++ and C. Java was widely seen as a great language, or at least a language that presented a great improvement over the existing mainstream languages. It gave GC to the masses for the first time. It delivered standard-sized primitives, an (almost) everything's-an-object design, a cross-platform runtime, JIT compilation, and a host of other improvements to mainstream programmers for the first time. Java has a lot of issues, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty good language.<p>Stroustrup was dead on: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." The more popular a language is, the more people will complain about it. (And the more people will build crappy software around it.)

It's been my experience that most people who put down Java or C++ or [your language here] have never seriously used the language and are insecure about learning a new language so they make fun of other languages to hide their insecurity.<p>Edit: I'll also add that this is not limited to the Ruby community.<p>One last edit: General Patton once said, "Find what a man is cynical about, and you will know his weaknesses." or something like that. I think that quote applies here.

Java is awesome purely because of the large corpus of useful libraries. Apache, stanford NLP, etc. Universities and open source groups contribute a large amount of Java code and it really pushes the boundaries of the types of applications you can create that are mature and perform well.<p>Other than that I develop much faster in Python or Javascript. I've come to love treating functions as first class objects, and I just don't love static typing that much anymore.<p>Getting my projects done more quickly has become more important than anything else. It just so happens that other languages than Java are better for that.

Java as a language is decent. It's boring. It is stagnant. I expect very little of it.<p>Java EE is an atrocity and it is just an over-enginnered pile of garbage.<p>Try play framework. I just finished a webapp in play and the whole experience has been awesome. IntelliJ + Play + MongoDB is AWESOME.<p>I haven't messed with the Scala version, but I can imagine that Scala + Play is even more interesting. Either way, Java EE/EJB/XMLHell is probably my most people hate Java. Also, Swing was garbage too, but who builds desktop apps in Java anymore anyway?

I believe there is hate because a lot of 'over engineering' was done in most projects. This then necessitated the need for more complicated (and `sometimes` useless) new Java techniques.<p>This most likely comes from seeing Java (or x,y,z) as thee only tool one would possibly need. Unfortunately, Java much like every other lang should be seen as a tool with pros and cons, in a chest of other tools.<p>Also, it's bad measure to only consider deployment size regarding any platform effectiveness.<p>" Let's learn more from Java". I'd rather learn more from "Computer Science" and apply those techniques to Java. Not the other way around.

I've done a ton of Java work, server side and desktop apps. What really amuses me about Java advocates is how they don't realize that the XML is not there for "configuration", it's there to form a dynamic (non-statically typed) appendage to the language. The trick of Spring and similar tools is that under the covers they use the reflection API. It's sort of a joke to claim that you are using static typing, when the config files are more or less a contained bit of dynamic typing.

Two other reasons I avoid Java the dependencies ecosystem for a typical Java app is bloated and always changing, and it didn't really live up to the promise of write-once-run-anywhere. And by the way, the over-abstraction habit is really annoying when you're trying to write a simple util app and you can't just say foo = new Foo() instead you have to extra nonsense such as factory = new FooParamsFactory() then fooparams = factory.getFooParams() then then foo = new Foo(fooparams) ... it's nice to get away from that nonsense. I just find Java to the playpen of architecture astronauts who would rather design APIs than write apps.

I may be the target of this article. I like Ruby quite a bit and I don't like Java at all. The word "hate" isn't quite appropriate, but here's my problem with Java:<p>I hate how much work Java makes me do to get things done.<p>It doesn't matter if you're writing "hello world", an English to pig-latin converter, a web server or a lisp interpreter. In every case, it's a lot less code and a lot less work to do in Ruby than it is in Java. Java is just too low-level of a language for anything I'm working on, and in those cases where I <i>do</i> need to get closer to the metal, it's easy enough just to use C.

Long live the JVM and here we go again comparing Java to Rails the framework. I've seen the pros and cons of both Java and Ruby. From an organizational standpoint it's hard to beat Java. The performance is there and in a team setting statically typed languages really shine. You can argue about the quality of programmers that flock to Java quoting pg ad nauseaum but we don't live in a lisp world. Elegant code is written by good programmers not the language.<p>Ruby is fun and really nice for exploring ideas though. It doesn't marry you to an IDE and you can go from idea to reality quite fast with a text editor and a command line. Unfortunately, Rails is a lot of meta-programming magic and syntactic sugar that can really obscure the language for newbies. It's changed the landscape for web frameworks and I would even say mobile as well. RoR didn't invent MVC but it certainly refined our thinking of frameworks in general.

I don't hate Java. I just prefer to write code in Ruby.

Another reason to stop hating on Java is that in a lot of cities, it would be a fool's errand to assemble another kind of dev team. Like Ruby? Great. Good luck building a team in Omaha.<p>Skills go where the jobs are: <a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=ruby&#38;l=Omaha%2C+NE" rel="nofollow">http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=ruby&#38;l=Omaha%2C+NE</a> = 11 jobs <a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=j2ee&#38;l=Omaha%2C+NE" rel="nofollow">http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=j2ee&#38;l=Omaha%2C+NE</a> = 101 jobs<p>Bottom line: if you expect to hire developers, in most places, you'll want a language with the deepest bench of talent. The trick is to resist the Java framework nazi's and keep it simple.

No. I prefer to continue hating Java.<p>Having recently decided to abandon my anti-Java prejudice from way back I've discovered that everything I hated about Java back in the 90s is still there, only worse.<p>COBOL at least had the excuse that it was first.

Job search in New York City on Dice.com: Java - 2698 Ruby - 204<p>Even within the Ruby jobs, the majority have a Java requirement within them as well.<p>Been hearing Ruby aficionados for like a decade, but sorry, it just hasn't penetrated.

This hardly starts to address the things people dislike about Java. Sure, it's a capable language - the JVM even more so. The thing is, it hasn't kept up with the pace of everything else. The JCP is clearly broken.<p>The best thing for people would be to move on, not in anger but to explore as many languages as possible. Java could very well be the best thing for some BUT you can't really say until you go out and look. From where I'm standing (subjective since I left Java ages ago) most people that go out to explore new things rarely go back.

I don't hate Java, I just don't want to use it.<p>I find it ridiculously verbose, and the lack of closures (or even passing around code references) leads to the perceived overengineering mentioned in the post (I'm not sure it's really overengineering all the time - it's just that a rather rigid language forces you to write huge amounts of code to make your library flexible).<p>That said I have no problem with using programs written in Java - in that case somebody else has already dealt with the things I don't like about Java.

What's the general consensus in the HN community regarding GWT? We're pretty happy with it and I think it has a lot of advantages over other frameworks.

“If you drop static methods, then welcome to Java and its billions of useless factories.”<p>And if you use them everywhere, then welcome to Rails, where to service more than 1 request at a time you actually have to run multiple instances of the whole app behind a balancer.

Ruby and Java serve different developer segments, it's much more fun to compare Java and C#. Java and C# are languages that are pretty much the same, serve similar markets but one of which I vastly prefer to program in because of the little niceties: no checked exceptions, first class functions, closures, properties, etc.<p>Comparing Java to Ruby is a philosophical matter, comparing Java to C# illustrates numerous ways in which the language and runtime (real support for generics) could improve while staying true to its market.<p>The article honestly looks like a comparison between rails and java rather than ruby and java.

I have a question...<p>The article states:<p>... Whenever you needed a pluggable system in your code you had to abstract away some concepts in order to make it work. Ruby lets us do it much easier and that’s cool. ...<p>Can someone give a concrete example of this?

Java had many problems with absurd over-engineering (aka EJB2) in the past. Even today, a LOT of legacy code is over-engineered and a pain to mantain.<p>That said, it is possible to write thin apps with Java today, much by the innovations brought by SpringSource. Roo is a rails-like framework to Java that works really well, and the Spring container took out the word EJB from almost every new project.<p>If I have to choose a language to start a new project today I will probably go with other language, but I have no problems working with Java at all.

I am not in the mood to defend Java, but I would like to give a tip to people who keep mentioning J2EE: J2EE is from a bygone era; learn to say Java EE 6, which is better (although JPA 2 is really the only part I like) and take J2EE out of your vocabularies. Discussing J2EE kind-of makes it sound like your knowledge is out of date.<p>Also, Scala and Clojure are wonderful languages so I don't understand some of the negative comments about them.

C# is a better Java anyway.

The part that I don't like is when I can't write a webapp in Java because I don't know about Hibernate and JBoss and Maven and servlets and JDBC and more. I'd love to try a strict language, having used only Clojure and Python lately. Playframework might be an alternative.

Didn't all those "good" things he mentions that come from Java actually come from other languages (Smalltalk, Haskell, Lisp, ...)?

I believe the fact that Oracle owns Java is almost reason enough to hate the language.

dammit its a tool, whats the big fuss about. People can act so juvenile some times.

&#62; "I always disliked the XML impact on the Java frameworks. It didn’t come from nowhere, though, let’s be fair. Java as a languages is not as readable as Ruby, so it wasn’t perfect for configuration. Yaml wasn’t popular and JSON was still not really mature back in 2000. Something had to be chosen and that was XML. What would you do better back then?"<p>This piece seems to be mistaking criticism of technology with criticism of people, which is what happens when nerds get too personally attached to languages, frameworks, OSs, etc. I don't think Java folks are stupid for using XML, or anything of the sort. The above succinctly lays out the reasons why that choice made sense at the time, but times change, and that is not a reflection on the judgment of those who made this decision.

What I don't understand is, why does this guy care if other people don't like the language he likes? It doesn't change the number of Java jobs or the kind of things you can do with the JVM, so why does he care if a bunch of Rubyists hate Java? Also if he doesn't want people to hate his language, maybe he should use something other than Java.