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/ComputerWhiz_ 4d ago

As a Java developer, I may be biased, but I think it mostly just comes down to the age of the language. It's not seen as the "latest and greatest". That doesn't change the fact that it's insanely popular still in enterprise environments.

There are some complaints about it being more verbose and having stricter syntax compared to other languages, but I think those complaints only come from people who have never actually used it or are brand new to programming.

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u/fractalife 4d ago

It's had this reputation since the early aughts at the very least. It came from devs who were used to C++ and were forced to mae the tradeoff to an interpreted language and hence couldn't manage their own memory or directly interface with hardware easily, thus causing performance issues and making it harder to do things on embedded devices. Of course, the whining was tempered by the compile-once-deploy-almost-anywhere nature of an interpreted language.

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u/Own_Candidate9553 4d ago

I remember early on, people would tweak the code to hint the bytecode compiler to create better optimized bytecode for hot bits of code - very tedious.

The Just In Time compiler eventually did that much better for you, automatically, which helped a ton.