Greentext

My inner mathematician respects Java. The first step in any problem is defining your universe

I still think Java is good for teaching newbies precisely because it will throw an error quickly if they are doing it wrong.

Forgot the JVM eating the entire machine's RAM for breakfast

Hello World

30 minutes of boilerplate

writing imports

$ cat <<EOF > Hello.java
public class Hello {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    System.out.println("Hello world!");
  }
}
EOF
$ java Hello.java
Hello world!

ok

Must be several years old - otherwise, javafx deserves quite a bit more ire.

I really enjoyed the text.

From the perspective of a python programmer it all seems valid.

A Java-Dev would probably write the same about an embedded engineer.

Aside from the general stupidity, Java is a heavily front-loaded language in my experience. I'm not going to engage in any tribalism about it or claim that it's better or worse than others. As a matter of personal taste, I have come to like it, but I had to learn a lot until I reached a level of proficiency where I started considering it usable.

Likewise, there is a level of preparation on the target machines: "Platform-independent" just means you don't have to compile the program itself for different platforms and architectures like you would with C and its kin, as long as the target machines have an appropriate runtime installed.

Libraries and library management is a whole thing in every general-purpose language I've dealt with so far. DSLs get away with including everything domain-specific, but non-specific languages can't possibly cover everything. Again, Java has a steep learning curve for things like Maven - I find it to be powerful for the things I've used it in, but it's a lot to wrap your head around.

It definitely isn't beginner-friendly and I still think my university was wrong to start right into it with the first programming classes. Part of it was the teacher (Technically excellent, didactically atrocious), but it also wasn't a great entry point into programming in general.

I'll never get the hate for java and love for python. It's like learning mandarin because you think it's easier than Spanish. When you know java you also kinda know javascript, C, Php, and others. When you know python, it's probably a government sponsored course, or a programming class talked your school district into buying their "intro to programming python course". Plus you only get to know python. I'll die on this hill

This is probably the best 100 second explanation of Java to exist.