Agnosticism Final
Recorded on 3/8/15 - Captured Live on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/idmrnscb.

By: yahshuatherock

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Agnosticism Final - Video

This question originally appeared on Quora: Why do many software engineers not like Java?

Answer by Michael O Church, functional programmer and machine learning engineer, on Quora

First, lets cover the technical issues. Its verbose, combines the worst of both worlds between static and dynamic typing by having a hobbled but extremely clunky type system, and mandates running on a VM that has a macroscopic startup time (not an issue for long-running servers, but painful for command-line applications). While it performs pretty well nowadays, it still isnt competitive with C or C++ and, with a little love, Haskell and OCaml can or will eclipse it in that domain. For real-world production servers, it tends to require a fair amount of JVM tuning.

The VM itself has a lot to recommend it. It offers concurrency and garbage collection at a level of quality that, until recently, wasnt found anywhere else. Python may have a better user experience, but it also has a GIL, which rules out parallelism. Much important software in the early 2000s was written in Java because, at the time, it was the best choice, even taking the mediocrity of the language itself into account. It had Unicode (albeit, UTF-16) from the start and a strong concurrency story, and it was a notch above C++ in terms of user experience (because, really, who wants to debug template errors deep in someone elses legacy code?)

If you put Java on a technical trial, it doesnt do so bad. The language sucks, the platform is pretty good for most purposes. I do hate the dominant interpretation of object-oriented programming with a passion, because it objectively sucks. See: Michael O. Churchs answer to Was object-oriented programming a failure?

So lets talk about the political and cultural issues. First, the dominant Java culture is one of mediocrity and bad taste, with MetaModelVibratorVisitorFactory classes dominating. Ive heard a number of experts on the Java issue argue that Javas biggest problem is the community, and that comes directly from the fact that good programmers dont want to deal with the bastardization of OOP that has entrenched itself in mainstream corporate development. You have a lot of people who trained up as Java programmers, havent seen a command line ever, and have no clue how the computer actually works. Most of them have never actually written a program; they just write classes and some Senior Chief Architect (who makes $246,001 per year and hasnt written a line of code since the 1990s) figures out how to stitch them together, and then tells some other clueless junior how to implement the glue in the gutshot hope that one will actually have the talent to make an actual working program out of the mess.

This isnt inherent to the JVM, because Clojure (currently hosted on the JVM, although its endgame seems to be language-agnosticism) has a radically different (and better) community. Scalas community is more mixed, but the top Scala engineers (the ones making tools like Spark and Kestrel) are really freaking good.

The root problem, lying under all of this, is that God clearly intended for the programmer-to-program ratio to be one-to-many. Its much more productive and engaging to work that way. Programs should be small, and when you need a lot of code to solve a large problem, you should create a system and give it the respect that systems deserve. The vision that seems ensconced in the modern Java community is one of Big Programs where the programmer-to-program ratio is many-to-one. Ive written at length about why this leads inexorably to political behavior and low productivity: Java Shop Politics.

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Java Makes Programmers Want To Do Absolutely Anything Else With Their Time