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Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

Why Big Band Music Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 - You Can Dance To It

There are still fans of Big Band music!

Java fans (or maybe I should say, employers) who want to keep exhuming this dead horse might be well served to emphasize "you can get a job" and "it's enterprise" and "JIT makes Java faster than Assembly" as they have been doing for decades, rather than tarting it up (a Java logo with an electric guitar, seriously Dad?) and comparing it to languages which are even more ancient. Java is closing in on 20 years old...

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Ruby is 18, Python is 22, what's your point? I'd very much like to hear your valid criticism towards Java. From my point of view that language and ecosystem is alive and well and newer iterations of Java EE have been giant leaps forward in terms of productivity.

Java isn't a bad language, but the point is that it doesn't offer much what other languages don't. It's unique selling point is that it is there, and that it's widespread.

Said politely, Java is “conservative” to include new features. Take for example lambdas, which make writing async code, inversion of control, and yes, functional programming much more easy. All modern competitors to Java have lambdas: C++11 and C# (LINQ! need I say more?), plus basically everything except C. Java 8 has still to ship. A more flexible object system, e.g. using traits, would not be impossible to implement, but I doubt this will show up before C++ has them ;-)

Ecosystem? Well, that is a good argument, but other languages have ecosystems as well.

Well, interfaces with default methods in Java 8 are a form of traits.

this. lisp is 50+ and still the most syntactically awesome thing eva.

OK. Nobody is trying to sell how Lisp "rocks more than ever" and is the great new style.

My point is that Java isn't the new hotness and it's ridiculous to sell it that way.

Ruby’s 20. Just FWIW.

More like Why Stadium-Scale Sound Systems Rock (even if you play shit music on them).

JVM != Java

Oh, absolutely, but even the Java language is quite fine. Even new languages like Go and Dart are essentially modified forms of Java, and Java 8 is a welcome improvements.

Those programmers who like the Java gradual-improvement philosophy and find Java 8 lacking, should try Kotlin.

Others who want a truly beautiful, elegant and modern language, should try Clojure (and for those who like Haskell but find it too easy, or prefer a truly complicated language with a lot of power but no coherent philosophy whatsoever other than a collection of lots-and-lots of haphazard features – there's Scala ;)).

As a Java fan I claim that Java is the best choice for lots of projects. What other language has:

- amazing tooling

- static typing

- great performance

- huge amount of libraries available

- multiplatformity

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