I will die on the hill that Java was a good language, and had the potential to leapfrog us from where we are by at least a decade.
But it got hobbled by the awful, awful enterprise style culture, cultural misunderstanding of OOP (especially inheritance), and corporation shenanigans (fucking oracle).
I think this is a selection bias speaking rather than a reasonable reflection of what goes on in the Java world. Some insanely sophisticated and high quality technologies are written with Java.
The problem is like with JS or PHP, it is ubiquitous in many settings. There are a lot of people who can use it because it was the default language taught in CS programs, many corporate settings for decades, or similar. It’s the runtime for android devices. It’s everywhere. Of course you’ll encounter a lot of low quality developers.
Your comment mostly indicates that you haven’t been fortunate enough to encounter the high quality Java devs, not that they don’t exist. They exist and they build world class software that backs massive systems like elastic search, Kafka, spark, or Cassandra.
Compose and AOT compiled binaries would be amazing (GraalVM Native Image kinda thing) but it doesn't look very easy at the moment. Leyden with a regular JVM might be the best we get.
We were writing and shipping desktop applications with it back in the nineties. Although many of the arguments against it were similar to the arguments against Electron today.
I think the UI look and feel was very ugly for many users and that caused its demise. The cross platform skin was ugly. The native skins were in the uncanny valley.
The framework was reasonably good for its time. By the time good looking UI frameworks came, the bad reputation was already set.
I will die on the hill that Java was a good language, and had the potential to leapfrog us from where we are by at least a decade.
But it got hobbled by the awful, awful enterprise style culture, cultural misunderstanding of OOP (especially inheritance), and corporation shenanigans (fucking oracle).
Java may be good, but it's boring. No joy comes from programming in Java.
I need to enjoy my work to be engaged and productive.
You can use Clojure to get all the goodness from Java and still have fun
That is a matter of taste. I enjoy programming in Java just fine.
I have nothing against java. But for some reason in my experience all the developers using it are low quality, and gave it the reputation it has.
I think this is a selection bias speaking rather than a reasonable reflection of what goes on in the Java world. Some insanely sophisticated and high quality technologies are written with Java.
The problem is like with JS or PHP, it is ubiquitous in many settings. There are a lot of people who can use it because it was the default language taught in CS programs, many corporate settings for decades, or similar. It’s the runtime for android devices. It’s everywhere. Of course you’ll encounter a lot of low quality developers.
Your comment mostly indicates that you haven’t been fortunate enough to encounter the high quality Java devs, not that they don’t exist. They exist and they build world class software that backs massive systems like elastic search, Kafka, spark, or Cassandra.
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It is better to be D language then - natively compiled and has superb meta programming features.
Especially if to consider that I've added native D support to Sciter [1].
[1] https://terrainformatica.com/2026/06/05/ai-assisted-developm...
Java would be a killer platform if they shipped built-in, tauri-like, UI.
There's Compose Multiplatform if you are willing to switch to Kotlin. Only caveat is that it uses Canvas rendering on web.
Compose and AOT compiled binaries would be amazing (GraalVM Native Image kinda thing) but it doesn't look very easy at the moment. Leyden with a regular JVM might be the best we get.
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At this point I think that would be a more sane outcome than whatever it is we have right now.
We were writing and shipping desktop applications with it back in the nineties. Although many of the arguments against it were similar to the arguments against Electron today.
I think the UI look and feel was very ugly for many users and that caused its demise. The cross platform skin was ugly. The native skins were in the uncanny valley.
The framework was reasonably good for its time. By the time good looking UI frameworks came, the bad reputation was already set.
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Yeah back then a java application could take several minutes to open.
The Revenge of Javagator!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817
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