Technology

The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside

Things could have been a lot different!

One Rich Asshole Called Lary Ellison

Usually the teachers/professors/lecturers have no real world experience of software development besides the usually university projects

Adding to this: university projects are built on a relatively short timeframe compared to many industry projects. The growing pains that typically occur after a few years of continuous development is unlikely with the small scale of university projects.

I wouldn’t go to a university professor for advice on how to build a system that will last a decade of development.

My 2 cents is that it would have flourished a lot longer if eclipse wasn't stretched so thin like using a very thick amorphous log that is somehow still brittle? And ugly? As a bookmark.

Python is easy, but it can also be infuriating. Every time I use it, I'm reminded how much I loathe the use of whitespace to define blocks, and I really miss the straightforward type annotations of strong, non-dynamically typed languages.

I don’t think weakly- or dynamically-typed languages are a good thing to base computer science curriculum around. Yes, it’s “easier”. But you will genuinely have a FAR better understanding the language and the logic you’re writing in it if you work in the scope of strong and static typing - or, at least have linters that force you to (e.g. mypy for Python)

The argument I agree with is that Python is the best language to learn if it's your only language, and Java is the best first language if you're going to learn others. The syntax from Java is shared across so many other languages and it forces you to learn about things like objects and types. You could make an argument for C or C++ but Java's handholding is more beginner friendly imo

I learned C++ as my first language and it was a great way to understand the core issues of a programming language — like memory allocation, memory freeing, the difference between memory addresses and the memory contents themselves, threads, system calls, etc. Java obscures these nuances to a degree, but Python is too friendly and makes it hard to understand them at all.

I believe if you learn C++ you can easily learn any other language. After C++, I learned Python, JavaScript, and Java in a few days each without formal instruction. If you learn Python first, you’re probably going to struggle learning those other languages because you haven’t grasped the lower level concepts yet and may never if you’re not in a formal setting that forced you to learn them.

No one disagrees that Python is easier, but if your goal is to get a foundation in programming that allows you to easily pick up other languages, you should start with C++.

It's a cycle all popular languages go through. First only experimental applications and super opinionated programmers use it. Then everyone wants to use it for everything. Then it finds a niche where it excels and settles.

I remember Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript going through those phases as well. Currently, everything is Rust.

I think I need to clear a common misconception people seem to have here: Oracle has very little to do with Java.

At most, Oracle has the following connection to Java:

• Own the trademark
• Have a build of the JDK/JRE with commercial support.

However, Java as a language's baseline comes from OpenJDK, an open source (GPL 2.0) community project which is upstream to several builds including Oracle's JVM. It follows a "bazaar" like development model similar to the Linux kernel where you can see their mailing lists and track what's being worked on. Anyone can contribute and the code is on Github: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk.

That being said, you don't even need to use Oracle's JDK (it sucks IMO) and use one of the community provided builds of OpenJDK. OpenJDK builds are provided by Eclipse, Amazon, Azul, Bellsoft and even Microsoft provides JDK/JRE builds. These are free of cost and have longer term support than Oracle's offering.

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OOP was hype during the 90s. Schools adapted their curriculum to this trend. So they needed a programming language for this, and Java became the choice. C++ is too tricky as a first language.

The result is that a lot of people knew Java, which means it’s a good choice of language if you want to recruit programmers.

I believe most of Java’s success was luck. It released at the perfect time.

Java was the new hotness when I was in the middle of my comp sci degree. The biggest benefit I found was javadocs. Other languages had shit documentation that usually didn’t match reality in comparison.

JVM isn't mediocre. Really-really.

I don't like something aesthetically about Java, can't quite nail what, and don't like long-long namespace strings, but these are my personal limitations.

Ah. I also don't like OOP.

The difference is people still write Java, regardless of whether it's a dated pos or not, so the use cases have evolved

Then there's the use of the JVM/JRE which have evolved even more due to Scala, Clojure & Kotlin

If you want to do something java like, try Kotlin. Its a more modern take on java and not developed by Oracle

Kotlin is now the language of choice for Android.