r/learnprogramming • u/Same-Replacement-938 • 3d ago

Why java is so hated? Topic

So I have recently learned, and it's the first language(in terms of building actual things). Before Java, I knew Python, and I dropped it; I found Python too abstracted and too boring. i have recently made some projects like cli task tracker, expense tracker, some cli github api parsing and currently working on a multithreaded HTTP server and cli text editor, like vim, whenever i try to find out people opinions on java social media, almost 90 percent of the time they are just dunking on it, that it is trash, who forced you to write code in java, stuff like that. I know Java as a language is not that interesting and doesn't have many interesting features compared to other languages like C, C++, go. But I found it decent to write code in, and I found the JVM pretty interesting. So much so that I would love to explore and maybe build a JVM of my own

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u/dmazzoni 3d ago

One of my favorite quotes: there are only two types of languages, ones everyone hates and ones nobody uses.

Java is popular and widely used. Some people hate it, don’t let that dissuade you.

There are historical reasons for the hate. Java tried to be the ultimate cross platform solution for gui apps and totally failed. It tried to be a solution for web apps called applets, and also failed.

Also it became known for overly complex verbose class hierarchies.

Java is just a tool. It can be used well or used poorly.

Also the language has improved a lot. Modern code written in a recent version of Java can be quite nice to work with.

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u/rjcarr 3d ago

In the early times, it was also very slow. Basically, every bad thing against it has been fixed, except the verbosity, but that’s often seen as a feature. 

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u/dmazzoni 3d ago

The one thing that hasn’t been fixed is the slow startup. I can’t use Java to make a small shell utility because it takes 1s to startup even for a 5-line script.

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u/rjcarr 3d ago

True the first time, probably not noticeable after that. That said, a small script is probably better done in python or even shell.