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Comment by wting | Hacker News Reader

Java is a commonly used language, but not very popular according to a Hacker News poll from 2012:

https://i.imgur.com/toGKy21.jpg

In fact, it's likability percentage is worse than PHP!

I think the issue may stem from the fact that given a choice, few people use Java in their own projects but have no choice at work.

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Unfortunately, most of these polls don't really talk about the context. I don't think I've ever been as unhappy as a developer (in terms of the tools) as when I was required to use Spring, Hibernate, Eclipse, and so forth to do web development. There was absolutely no reason we couldn't be using Rails or Django for our needs - this was a top down management situation, and I'm sure my political frustrations contributed to my unhappiness.

However, a recent coursera course on Data Structures and Algorithms used Java, and I really didn't mind it at all. I'd even say I found it reasonably pleasant to use Java.

when it comes to large, complex, distributed, long-living projects, java is the best choice. sure, I can build a quick prototype using python, php, node, ruby, its hard to rely on them when the project becomes large, distributed, complex etc.

IMHO its the only language that allows to create great server side programes, awesome desktop GUI applications, mobile applications or embedded applications. All in one language.

I'll agree there of course; as an ecosystem it's hard to match due to the availability of libraries and ease of platform swapping. My original comment was targeted purely at the language syntax and semantics. Like I said, there are many reasons to use Java, but I'd rather use something else given the choice

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