this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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I think it's a mix of three things.
Java is the only programming language to get popular as a result of marketing. Java was marketed so hard that the company who built it (Sun) went under, but Java did get some really wide adoption.
Java is the backbone of Android. If you want to build apps for Android you're using Java or one of the languages built on top of it (Kotlin, Scala, etc).
It's pretty hard to justify rewriting your codebase to another language. So Java is still around. If you need more proof of this, Most people are still using Java 8 (including android) we are currently at ~java 20.
Clarification:
Very few android jobs are Java anymore. Native android is almost exclusively Kotlin, barring legacy code.
This is because Kotlin has nearly full interop with Java code and integrates into Gradle well. You can just swap over to Kotlin dev with a small investment of a few weeks learning curve, then program faster and cleaner than Java.
Android is currently on Java 17 for what it's worth, though very few codebases have gone through the process of upgrading to 17/Kotlin 1.9/Gradle 8.1
Huh, I thought the android stack was basically hard stuck at Java 8 and that's why Kotlin still supports Java 8.
Nah we were stuck for years but then they migrated to 11 and now 17.
...I just ran the migrations so I'd know.
Surveys don't seem to back this up any more... Yes there's a lot of Java 8 code. But more and more of it is maintenance rather than new development. Respondents of surveys that are able to list the versions they use in production (vs 'pick one') have indicated that for many teams with exposure to Java 8, they also have newer versions in production - showing that Java 8 is increasingly about maintenance than ongoing development (with the blocks to moving forward being a mix economic and technical factors).
The most dominant frameworks in the industry are ending their support for Java 8 - so not too far down the track, staying on Java 8 will mean that while you can pay for platform support, framework support is going to disappear anyway.
Yes Java 20 is the current release, with Oracle's LTS being Java 17 (the previous ones being 17, 11 and 8 - with 8 having the largest paid support window).
Java 21 is out in a couple of weeks and will become the new Oracle LTS (other vendors and frameworks tend to align on this LTS designation so it continues to be important).
I think you replied to the wrong comment but: all correct.
Oops. Just imagine the karma I would have lost, were I still on Reddit...
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.
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 traction if it was released today because of the licensing issues.