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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Things are boring when you already know them. Things are interesting when you're learning something new. Most of the excitement over other languages comes down to the fact that you are starting from scratch and everything is fresh.

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As someone who coded both Java and Javascript today, I attest that boring is also when every little darn thing takes 10x the amount of time and code as it rightfully ought to.

Boring is also spending a few hours tracking down a typo in a large Javascript app. Or trying to refactor something and grepping through a bunch of files trying to find the ways in which it's being used. There are downsides and upsides to both kinds of development.

Really? I guess you spend too much time coding than solving a problem.

Java / Python / C# / Go... All the same.. I spend more time solving a problem than actually coding.

Once I have a solution rewriting in an another language is a piece of cake.

Right.

I think Java does suffer from a little too much boilerplate, but that is solved by becoming proficient in an IDE which doesn't actually take too long. Even for this old hacker who only picked up an IDE 2 years ago after nearly 20 years of emacs.

Java is very verbose, but also very strict and explicit. Besides all the obvious benefits to that, it means you can utilize auto-complete/intellisense/refactoring tools that let you pound out code at a rate on par with dynamic languages, even if you are producing 10x the amount of code. Fully learning these tools, e.g. in Eclipse, is a meta-skill that can take some time to get good at, but if you're working with Java for anything over a few weeks, it's definitely worth it.

This is very true. It's why I seem to keep looking at Clojure articles and tutorials lately. I keep saying I should master language "X" then I jump to something new...Thankfully I'm just a hobbyist.

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