Comment on The Top Programming Languages 2023
lysdexic@programming.dev 9 months agoJava is the only programming language to get popular as a result of marketing.
I don’t think this is true. Java is an outstanding tech stack and was revolutionary in a lot of ways, to the point that it motivated others to shamelessly clone it and in the process create other outstanding tech stacks. See C#.
For starters, Java solved the deployment problem way before containerization was a thing. Developers could simply put together a fat JAR, drop it in a web server like Tomcat, and it would simply reload without a hiccup.
Java is also very tooling-friendly, and has a solid versioning policy.
Solemarc@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I kind of agree and kind of don’t.
I don’t think that C# exists solely because Microsoft thought Java was a good idea. If that was the case C# wouldn’t have been chained to windows for as long as it was. I think Microsoft didn’t want to see a general purpose programming language which could also run on Mac and Linux. They’ve clearly changed their mind now but Java is still massive compared to C#.
I suppose Java did kind of solve the multiple deployment issue and it is pretty funny that the more WASM standards evolve the more they look like the JVM. Ultimately this was a bit before my time so I can’t really comment but there’s a reason “write once, debug everywhere” is a meme.
I’m not the biggest fan of Java’s tooling, I hate that its package managers are separate from it, python and C# can both do it why can’t java! I’m not sure what you mean by versioning policy but if you mean the ordeal surrounding Java versions I really disagree. In this case, I think Java is very lucky it already has wide adoption, I don’t think Java would get any real adoption because of its licenses if it didn’t already have a user base.