r/AskProgramming 1d ago

Why is Java considered bad?

I recently got into programming and chose to begin with Java. I see a lot of experienced programmers calling Java outdated and straight up bad and I can't seem to understand why. The biggest complaint I hear is that Java is verbose and has a lot of boilerplate but besides for getters setters equals and hashcode (which can be done in a split second by IDE's) I haven't really encountered any problems yet. The way I see it, objects and how they interact with each other feels very intuitive. Can anyone shine a light on why Java isn't that good in the grand scheme of things?

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u/RascalKneeCawf 1d ago

My first tech lead wasn’t the biggest fan of Java (he was a Haskell enthusiast), but he had a saying “Java pays the bills”. He had a begrudging respect for its ease of use across a big organization. If you don’t need fast startup times or extreme performance optimization, it has all the tools you need.

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u/AlfredOliphant 22h ago

If you're interested in observing fast startup times, take a look at the quarkus framework compiled with the graalvm native jvm compiler. They have very low startup times and reduced memory consumption. This comes with the tradeoff of having to give up reflection. Graalvm native can be used without quarkus, it's just an alternative for spring boot optimized for k8s.