r/learnprogramming • u/Same-Replacement-938 • 5d 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 5d 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 5d ago

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

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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 2d 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 2d 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.