Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

The language has/had some rough edges that have been improved over the years, but the developer experience of using a strongly-typed, object-oriented language within a sturdy IDE like Idea is just second to none. The debugging process is so very straightforward. Java became synonymous with enterprisey bloated systems for good reason, but there is no pile of mud Java system that can't be stepped through cleanly with a debugger.

I'd also throw in what was possibly their greatest idea that sped adoption and that's javadoc. I'm not sure it was a 100% original idea, but having inline docs baked into the compiler and generating HTML documentation automatically was a real godsend for building libraries and making them usable very quickly. Strong typing also lined up nicely with making the documents hyper-linkable.

Java was really made to solve problems for large engineering teams moreso than a single developer at a keyboard.

I find these discussions have an interior split between the folks who are more concerned with getting the feature out now versus the folks who have had to keep a thousand ancient features running.