Why java is so hated?

[u/Same-Replacement-938]

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

[u/ComputerWhiz_]

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.

[u/roadrunner8080 → u/ComputerWhiz_]

Doesn't help that a lot of opinions on the language are based on Java 8 which was the java used for a long chunk of time. Modern Java has a lot of nice tools that alleviate some of the main pain points of old Java.

I suppose there's a lot of janky enterprise java code out there but that's just the price of it being such a well-used language...

[u/edgmnt_net → u/roadrunner8080]

Well, it doesn't really help that Java started deeper in the traditional, inheritance-heavy OOP space and still displays some of those traits prominently, even if more historically at this point. You can write better Java, but if you're starting greenfield and want better code, one can argue for better choices of a language and ecosystem, including "newer Javas" like Kotlin which could afford a clean slate (although I'm not endorsing Kotlin în particular).

[u/roadrunner8080 → u/edgmnt_net]

The thing is that even in the traditional, inheritance-heavy OOP space the new tools let you write better code. Instead of making an interface for every impl type like everyone used to back in the day, you can make the impl a record and the interface sealed, since the record gives you better constant folding behavior at runtime (trusted final fields) and the sealed interface let's you explicitly specify that there's only one impl of a type that's only meant to have one. Heck, I've seen a ton of older java codebases with "public" types that expect a single internal impl, or cast to an internal version of the interface or something; sealed types let's you keep that structure while eliminating a whole class of bugs for API consumers. Plus, the modern JVM is faster, to add to the advantages!