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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with Ruby + Sorbet, and also with Java. I would rather write Ruby + Sorbet than Java right now. Ruby is a really nice language.

Though Java still has some great strengths, especially the 8+ functional programming features and the concurrency library is great. If I could use Rails with Java it might be a different story though, since I hate Spring.

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If I put together my top ten language features it would include documentation (both for the core language but also the doc framework for coders), legible stack traces, tight IDE integration (this typically requires strong+strict typing), easy debugging, first class build tools for perfectly reproducible builds and dependency management, and easy version management. Java ticks all those boxes. In fact, I think the thing that launched Java in the first place was not nonsense like checked exceptions, it was javadoc. In terms of syntax and semantics, I've never felt any more or less comfortable coding in anything in the Algol family. Anyone who's been coding long enough knows that 98% of the complexity in building software is people. And anything that helps you understand other people's code is 10X more valuable than anything that helps you code faster.

I started my career in Java and although I loved IntelliJ and was perplexed by how poor RubyMine seemed by comparison (circa 2012) that's not enough for me to go back from Ruby to Java.

What I'm realising now is that Java has (had?) a really clunky type system and that there are other languages that do types better, so I shouldn't use Java as my reason for avoiding them.

You could use JRuby

JRuby is a really cool project! Unfortunately it's fairly far behind mainstream Ruby. They are still working on Ruby 2.7 compatibility, but Ruby 2.6 end-of-life is 2022/03/31 (tomorrow).

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