• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    I’m still wondering what Java’s niche is, it seems like it does everything, but nothing particularly well. I guess it found a home on Android, but I don’t think that’s because it’s particularly well-suited for it.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Java is still massive in corporate software. As in, internal software for corporation’s day to day operations. Machinery management, inventory software, point-of-sale applications, floor management, automated finance tracking. Stuff that isn’t really cool or talked much about.

      And of course there’s Java’s most important job. Coming up with features and syntax that Microsoft can copy and steal for C#.

    • PapstJL4U@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Working, decently robust software that was designed 15 years ago doesnt just get replaced.

    • gedhrel@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      The point of Java is to be a language for 90% of programmers. The vast majority of software development is not sexy, doesn’t require a PhD. Java was intended to be a commoditising language and in that it succeeded wildly.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        it succeeded in holding back the entire field of programming for a decade via that mindset by having people blindly apply stupid Java design patterns to everything.

    • vinnymac@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Show me an Android app written in Java, and I’ll show you the line of developers ready to rewrite it in Kotlin.

        • vinnymac@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          You must not write much Kotlin then? It’s far more than sugar when a language fixes core issues in another.

          It’s a modern, statically typed language that addresses many of Java’s longstanding limitations with robust type safety, expressive functional features, coroutine-based concurrency, and extensibility — all integrated natively. Interoperability with Java is a strength, not a sign of dependency.

          Calling Kotlin merely syntactic sugar is like saying Swift is just Objective-C with prettier syntax — it misses the deep improvements in language design, safety, and developer experience.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            I’ve written a fair amount, enough to know it’s a significant improvement on Java, but that it still suffers from the unnecessary abstraction in the standard library. And that’s pretty much my main problem with Java.

            Swift is a different story because the main issue with Objective C is the syntax.