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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

Java isn't that bad, I'd say. ;) I've been in web development for almost 20 years, and used quite a lot of stuff, including PHP, Perl, C++, Java, Ruby and even such a weirdo like Informix WebConnect. Java is still my favorite, and the reason is the true modularity. You can combine Java EE and Spring stacks (lots of XML already forgotten in distant past), you can choose any presentation layer implementation and the architectural flexibility is the real selling point for projects bigger than a homework. I can beleive if the author would switch to it and I'm surprised that you don't.

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yeah i do Scala now but same deal. Where I think the OP comment really goes wrong is when he says something like "you're gonna need all that stuff and you're gonna end up re-implementing it yourself". I really don't find that to be the case... when you're developing with libs you are cognizant of your app endpoints and just add whats needed. It's better to consciously add a lib or turn a feature on than to just accept a big ball of yarn that some cowboy framework devs shat out. In the Rails app at my job it takes a ton of debugging just to figure out how many layers of decorators are firing off around every model.

I might even go so far as to say that a lot of where JVM has strength is that contexts are pretty measurable... Spring containers, Akka systems. You instantiate them and hold them basically in the palm of your hand, you understand your scopes. Any technology that allows application scope to slip out of your fingers and intermingle with everything else under the sun is something I'd be wary of.

My own anecdote: at a previous job, new development was done in Rails, while "legacy" Python applications were maintained by one (!) guy. The Python apps were about the exact opposite of the Ruby apps -- cherrypy was used for the HTTP interface; very low level (compared to Rails, at least). He used to shake his head at the stack traces that Rails would spit out. "Intermingle with everything else under the sun" sounds about right.

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