One year after switching from Java to Go

The jvm is a pretty insane beast. It will do usage based recompilation, escape analysis for memory, so non heap allocation is super fast, has great memory safety... But a lot of people use it with spring/spring boot, a technology designed to work around the complexities of a particular type of middleware software in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's cargo cult programming of the highest order. In the OP, the author is comparing apples with oranges, with a bit of misunderstanding that java/jvm means spring boot, and while that is true for a lot of people and certainly a lot of stuff on the internet implies that 'this is the way', it's not required. Startup times of ~100ms are absolutely standard for a big program, similarly unit tests taking 1ms. I prefer to write kotlin rather than java, as it's a nicer language ,IMHO, but still those bytecodes run on Jvm and same stuff applies.

Edit: im not advocating writing 'ls' in java, and I would also agree that java uses more memory for small programs, so its not a systems programming language probably.

Just use new() it's pretty fast.

Yep.

Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful.

If you instead of spring boot just pick a few dependencies you really need, you don't throw the whole Design Patterns book at it just because you can, and you don't try to make everything changeable without recompiling or redeploying, it's pretty nice to work with

Like the article I hear Spring Boot here mentioned again. I also really hate the annotation culture. This is big in Spring Boot, and more common in Java since it is so damn verbose.

It is not inherent in Java though, and the Kotlin "developer culture" seems to be much more annotation averse (as we all should be).

You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go? Even on a vanilla language to vanilla language basis, but let alone against something like Spring Boot that does almost everything for you in a typical CRUD application.

Annotations are declerative shorthands. How is a trivial spring boot endpoint with methods with a single @GET line above them denoting the endpoint verbose?

What about a single SQL query in an annotation above an interface method's name? Will your whole implementation of connect to db, execute query, iterate over the resulting rows, and convert them to some native object/struct shorter than.. 2 lines?

> You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go?

I might agree if you're speaking about Java since ~11 or so.

One of my biggest complaints about Java, especially before the lambda syntax caught on, was how many extra files it made me create. I felt like every project had lots of wrapper classes, and people would make a make a file for each class.

You could argue that that was "bad" Java and they should have nested the classes, and that's fair enough, but it certainly wasn't uncommon Java. It artificially makes the language feel way too verbose if you have ten files more than would be necessary in a comparable language.

Once people started to embrace the lambda syntax, I feel that Java got immediately more fun to write; you weren't constantly creating one-off instantiations of interfaces or classes (well, at least not explicitly anyway), and the language felt considerably more streamlined.

Java 21 is actually one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in quite awhile in the tech world, in that I'm actually having fun writing Java. Sealed interfaces and record patterns make some code considerably more pleasant, and I actually have been writing Java in my free time, which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago.

ETA:

https://youtu.be/jgkEHoc3YUw?t=288 See! I even said I would never enjoy writing Java!

> which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago.

I think a lot of people are noticing the changes Java has had in the previous years. The language has made a lot of improvements, and I feel that the mind set of the community has changed. The old enterprise way of factories and unnecessary abstractions have lost a lot of popularity, and is mostly still alive in legacy software/teams and universities who have not yet caught up.

Even Spring Boot is now a valid approach for getting sh*t done for startups. There are of course frameworks that are more light weight, or you can start from scratch and choose your own libraries to keep the size down. But SB is simply good enough for most use cases, and even supports native compilation now.