This is correct. It is about culture too. Java is the kind of language that attracts some mediocre programmers who produce mediocre code based on the wrong ideas of object oriented programming. of course, there are great Java programmers. It is just that a better programming language would help average programmers like us to achieve more
That escalated quickly. There are good and less good people everywhere and using language X does not automatically tell anything about you.
If anything I think the cases where you can use Go successfully are only o fraction of the cases where you can use Java successfully. It's not necessarily Java itself but the ubiquity of the JVM and its ecosystem (see Kotlin, see Scala as examplea that have leveraged this ecosystem successfully)
So the ideal blub language will be whatever language is too new to really be the legacy thing with tons of black magic you just have to know, but also too old to include tons of new ideas in language design the programmer has to grapple with.
Old languages force you to understand really core issues because the stack is 1m+ lines of code and you need an operating model for all that magic.
New languages do the same thing, but it's because half the really good stuff is <experimental>
Python and JS are in the current sweetspot, go is up next, and after that, Rust.
Imho Go is really good for self contained micro-services. The way Go does binaries and the cross-compilation part are great.
Otoh, Java has a huge ecosystem. Huge. This plus dependency managemnt make it the first choice in most cases. Not even going to go into the massive innertia given that Java has been around for decades (who is going to rewrite everything in go?)
Today most of the time I pick Kotlin which is sort of whatbJava could have been (or maybe will become) with proper investment and care.
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. - Rob Pike
You're entitled to your opinion. I guess I must be a mediocre programmer then. (Don't forget that 90% of developers thinks of themselves as above average.) But if Java can evolve, why wouldn't its practitioners?
In the past, when java was dominant and most popular language - sure.
Today though, with languages like js being the most popular one, I would be surprised if inflow of mediocre developers into Java world would be even the same, not to mention higher, then with those more popular languages (Go included)
This generalisation is easy to explain. On the server-side, Java "won" the enterprise battle. In the last 20 years, big corporates re-wrote their server-side C/C++ stack in pure Java (and thick desktop clients in C#). It is so much easier to maintain than C/C++. As a result, they can hire mediocre Java developers to maintain their "new" legacy services.
who produce mediocre code based on the wrong ideas of object oriented programming
This overlooks this history of OOP. Each decade, lots of new ideas have emerged so that skilled programmers continue to use the same languages (Java, C#, C++, C), but change how they use them. C++ in 1996? Let's fight about diamond inheritance! C++ in 2006? C++ in 2016? C++ in 2026? Repeat for all four languages that I mentioned. The story will look similar. Anyone good writing new code in these four languages isn't using many levels of inheritance. It is gone. Sure, it exists in the language for historical reasons, but it is hardly used in new code. "Prefer composition over inheritance."
And some people for no fucking reason think that they're smarter than everyone else and are qualified to tell others how they should go about they business.
> attracts some mediocre programmers who produce mediocre code
That will be reality for most companies, no matter the language. And if Java projects still got delivered in such conditions - it might also be a mediocre language but it is also just good enough.
Yeah that's not going to be too popular but Java in particular has a tech culture problem. It's way more common to find overengineering and overabstractions in Java projects than any other language.
The language itself might be fine but I'll never touch it because of that.
Despite the fact that this is a claim with no basis in reality, what you are saying is that people who don't understand the core concepts the language is built on write bad code...Isn't that true for every language?
