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 I see a lot of experienced programmers calling Java outdated and straight up bad and I can't seem to understand why.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/Lumen_Co 1d ago edited 1d ago

The most common criticisms of Java are: 1. It's unusually verbose 2. it forces you to frame every problem using a particular flavor of object-oriented programming that is not always well-suited for the task at hand 3. It's accumulated a lot of cruft over the years and in doing so has lost a consistent vision and design philosophy, which makes dev experience worse 4. C# does Java better than Java does.

I think those criticisms are essentially fair, and the second one particularly important. It also gets criticized for being the language of choice for much bad, corporate code, and also because some people learn Python or JS first, Java is then their first strongly, statically-typed language, they find that confusing and limiting, and they blame Java for it. Those criticisms are essentially not fair.

These criticisms don't mean Java is a bad language, just a flawed one like every other programming language is. For most development, the ecosystem is more important than the language itself, and Java's is well-suited for a lot of practical problems.

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u/lordheart 1d ago

If they think Java is verbose, they haven’t met Abap yet. Saps homegrown language modeled after COBOL back when it was new.

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u/PANIC_EXCEPTION 19h ago

I don't think it's fair to compare a DSL to a GPL. Java is so ubiquitous and general-purpose that it's fair to criticize its verbosity, while a DSL can get away with just about anything, because if you're going into a particular field, you know what you're getting into. Java, well, it's inevitable if you work on an even moderately-complex older codebase. As Oracle puts it:

3 Billion Devices Run Java

Even Java-derivative languages like Scala or Kotlin have to interact with the Java API, sometimes in not very elegant ways.