Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).

It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it)

But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

One area where C# really messed up is exception handling.

See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.

> they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code

That's so ignorant. Read the article please.

Let's revisit past conversations:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326

And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.