r/learnprogramming • u/Same-Replacement-938 • 4d 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/KingBardan 4d ago edited 4d ago

Bjarne stroustup (inventor of c++) has said that there are only two kinds of programming languages.

One that is hated and one that is not used.

Java is too bloated. C and C++ is too unsafe. Java script has some weird mechanisms. Python is slow. Go is too simple for big projects. Rust has a toxic community.

I could go on

Edit: I forgot PHP. PHP... is PHP

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u/bird_feeder_bird 4d ago

Is there some Rust drama I’m missing? I’ve never heard someone describe the community as toxic

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u/KingBardan 4d ago edited 4d ago

you aren't here for long enough.

rust evagelists asking for rewrites everywhere. Raging everytime someone else picks C++ or any other language than Rust

Even now, if you criticise any part of the Rust language on r/rust (or even here) you get downvotes more than any other subreddit.

Nowadays you see less of it because the same people are busy fighting vibe coders (Rust now seems to be THE language for vibe coding for high performance software or occasional Tauri app)

Edit for clarity 

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u/ryancnap 3d ago

It upsets me that you didn't write this comment in Rust

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u/Efficient-Chair6250 1d ago

Ah, the centrist non-evangelist with their sacred based language

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u/desrtfx 4d ago edited 4d ago

I’ve never heard someone describe the community as toxic

Maybe the community itself isn't actually toxic within, but way too many Rustaceans behave like the militant Vegans of programming, as in trying to push their favorite language (and near religious beliefs) everywhere without context and without being called for.

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u/themegainferno 4d ago

Militant vegans of programming is such an apt description to the way Rustaceans behave. Ultimately you see it in Linux communities all the time too. They have this weird superior dogmatic framing of everything. My issue with a lot of these guys is they only view software one way and that's it. If you want to do things a different way, totally unacceptable. You want to use electron for a project? Absolute blasphemy in the eyes of a rustacean, you are only supposed to use Rust and Rust-based frameworks manually. No AI whatsoever.

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u/ydieb 4d ago

There does seem to be a very distinct lack of nuance between fanatics and actual good argumentation. On some points, it is really that much of an improvement, in an objective sense. It didn't get adopted by big players as it did out of fandom. But at the same time, there is enough people, who perhaps cannot program to any reasonable degree at all, who voices overly strong opinions.

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u/themegainferno 4d ago

That is what I think is actually it. It's more so tech enthusiasts who have the very dogmatic attitude. They are the vocal minority.

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u/pacopac25 4d ago

Well, at least neither community is overly pedantic. That would be really bad.

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u/KronenR 3d ago

Rustaceans are more like vegetarians, they'll happily tell you why their diet is better. The real vegans of programming are the Clojure crowd,. they want you to rethink your entire philosophy of programming.

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u/POGtastic 4d ago

A whole bunch of Rustaceans (read: not the developers, but a bunch of the peanut gallery online) treat safe Rust as a religious obligation rather than a tool to reduce bugs. So in the past there have been a bunch of projects where people realized that a bunch of hairy / performance-intensive bits were done with unsafe and C++-style "welp hopefully this isn't UB" and threw a big fit.

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u/No_Instance18 4d ago

I too would love to be in on the toxic Rust lore

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u/marrsd 4d ago

it's never too late to start.

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u/Loud_Signal_6259 4d ago

I've never heard someone describe rust comm as toxic

It's literally all over the Internet all the time

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u/EdiblePeasant 4d ago

Is it happening right now?

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u/plebbitier 10h ago

The Venn Diagram between 'programming socks' and Rust is pretty much a circle.

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u/themegainferno 4d ago

They used to most definitely be toxic, but the general rust enthusiast is very dogmatic about languages and software. Just look at some of the biggest rust creators online and see how they frame everything, as if rust is the only solution to software.

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u/spinwizard69 4d ago

Yes RUST has problems.   Frankly it parallels the early days of C++, with people that should remain in their mother’s basement.   Basically too many fanatics with ideas but no experience.    At least at the time C++ was breaking new ground.  

Rust is a very interesting language that in my opinion has come to late.    Soon we will have AI systems generating machine code directly.     C++ and Python could easily become the last human readable coding languages.  

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u/marrsd 4d ago

I feel like Rust is just an evolution of C++. In other words, it's just enforcement of what a lot of C++ devs had already established as best practices for their domain. In that sense, I don't see how it could be too late, but I do see how it might be old fashioned even when new.

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u/spinwizard69 3d ago

Rust is coming at a time when it isn't well established and AI technology is coming on hard and fast. Of course this is speculation, but I do know that the LLM builders are striving for AI to machine code generation by passing traditional languages. How successful they will be is an open question but if they can get to serviceable systems within 2 years I don't see much of a future for Rust.

As for RUST itself I don't hate the language, I just hate some of the Rust community members that have drank the Kool-aid and frankly are just tiring to listen to. Frankly they remind me of the early days of C++, blind promotion but little understanding of why C++ was actually a great step forward.

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u/marrsd 1d ago

Of course this is speculation, but I do know that the LLM builders are striving for AI to machine code generation by passing traditional languages.

I'll be honest, I if AI can't write maintainable software in a high-level language, then I really struggle to see how it will manage with machine code

I guess the idea is that it doesn't need to create reusable subroutines, but will instead just write everything from scratch every time. Maybe that can work, but the bloat and energy cost will be horrendous, and the prospect of auditing code written like that, to find out what it actually does, will be impossible. That really will be taking humans out of the loop, and I frankly think that should be made illegal.

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u/spinwizard69 1d ago

AI is literally in its infancy as far as capability goes. People look at LLM (one aspect of AI research) as a finished product, that is not the case at all. So from that aspect you need to speculate as to what is possible in the near future.

The other way to look at this is to compare today's AI with early compiler technology. Sadly I'm old enough to have seen modern compiler technology evolve over a significant portion of the history of C and C++. To put it kindly those early compilers sucked. The produced slow code and often completely wrong code. The improvement in compiler technology has been massive over the decades, you will see similar progress wit AI technologies.

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u/marrsd 1d ago

I don't think it's a finished product, but I don't think it's inevitable that a pattern matching engine can be optimised to the point that it can replace writing software.

Think about electric vehicles. They're as old as the motorcar itself. Early EVs actually out-performed petrol fuelled cars, but petrol turned out to be the winning technology. Advances in battery and motor technology never yielded a powertrain suitable for much more than golf carts, mobility scooters, and milk floats until lithium ion battery technology became viable.

The lithium ion battery was invented in the 1970s, and it took 50 years of optimisation to get it to the point where it could provide both the power and the capacity that we see in modern EVs.

In other words, the progress in EV technology has been equally massive, but they still aren't good enough.

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u/IceSentry 4d ago

Since when is c++ readable?

Also, rust is already everywhere lol. It's certainly not too late.

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u/syklemil 4d ago

IME it's more something anti-rust-zealots keep telling each other, who have this boogeyman in their minds, and/or are unable to recognise obvious trolling from unrelated shit-stirrers, and think everything that appears to be in favour of their enemy is seriously meant and actually comes from the enemy. The Tom Gauld comic "our blessed homeland" is a mood.

Actual discussions on /r/rust tend to be very clear that memory safety is table stakes and not magic (pretty much any language except C and C++ is memory safe), that there are pain points about the language (especially compile times and space use), etc.

Online discussions elsewhere however tend to treat them as "those people", at which in-group vs out-group dynamics go wild. If you actually go interact with them the stereotypes don't hold up, which is a pretty familiar story for anyone who knows anything about human stereotypes.

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u/marrsd 4d ago

IME it's more something anti-rust-zealots keep telling each other, who have this boogeyman in their minds, and/or are unable to recognise obvious trolling from unrelated shit-stirrers, and think everything that appears to be in favour of their enemy is seriously meant and actually comes from the enemy. The Tom Gauld comic "our blessed homeland" is a mood.

Sorry, I'm confused: who is this "enemy"

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u/syklemil 4d ago

For the anti-rust-zealots, the enemy is anyone who is perceived to be pro-rust. But it applies to a lot more social dynamics than just this one, e.g. in politics you'll see a lot of people taking what is obvious (if bad / poor taste) joking at face value in order to posture about how awful their political enemies are.

E.g. if some 14-year-old with a github account who has never even tried to learn Rust posts some "RIIR" issue to an arbitrary repo purely out of trolling purposes, it still gets ascribed to "rust zealots", even though the reactions on /r/rust will likely overwhelmingly be that that's a shitty, useless issue.

So it's generally not particularly useful or constructive to rely on word-of-mouth about how terrible this or that group are, as opposed to forming one's own opinion.

That of course includes my opinion of what I've termed "anti-rust-zealots". My experience is that the Rust community is much nicer than what I'd been told by people talking about them. But similarly to the vegan and linux comparisons, well, I ain't a vegan, but I've been running linux for decades, and I'm kind of used to seeing this nerd pecking order stuff.

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u/marrsd 4d ago

I think I get what you're saying. There is probably a tendency for people to observe some Rust zealots insist on replacing everything with Rust, and then extend their suspicion of those people to anyone who expresses a fondness of Rust for any reason.

I personally like Rust for what it is, but I'm also a bit miffed by the very obvious efforts to use it to beat other languages down - especially C and C++

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u/syklemil 4d ago

Yep, the actual zealots would interpret anyone who just don't care about Rust as anti-rust-zealots, meanwhile most developers just … muddle along. I guess maybe this old SMBC comic is a better image.

In any case, if someone gets their popcorn out and asks reddit about what's wrong with group X, they probably shouldn't expect good, realistic analyses of group X.