back to article Java? Nah, I do JavaScript, man. Wise up, hipster, to the money

A while back I answered my door bell - it was the pizza. After transacting for the hot pie, the older delivery man with a Just Like Dear Old Dad mustache asked: "Are you a programmer?" pointing to the OpenStack logo on my hoodie sleeve. "Yes," I said, "well, I used to be." He asked me what programming language he should learn …

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  1. wolfetone Silver badge
    Pint

    We do see people saying "Well why don't you code it in Go/Swift/Anything Else", but really when and where are you every going to refactor code used by massive companies? If you were starting a project with a clean piece of paper, 6 months or however long, you could probably make the application in a different language.

    But most of the time you are given code that is already in use, that supports many different types of software (which could all be legacy software systems as well), and you're given 3 months to do it and it needs to work first time. There isn't room for a rolling release type of solution to fix all the bugs that come from new code.

    I've been 10 years working in development now, all of that time (except for a 6 month awful relationship with VB.NET) I've coded in PHP. I've hit my salary ceiling. I go on to the job boards and all I see are Junior PHP positions, or "Senior" PHP positions which pay no more than what I'm on now. But Java? You can't move for Java positions which pay a lot more than what I'm on.

    10 years is long enough to have spent with a language and I was looking around at what I could do instead. Teaching came up, moving in to Law also came up, but then I read this article and I'm thinking sod it. I'm going to learn Java.

    Thank you author! You've given me an idea to progress my career for another 10+ years. Have a pint.

    1. Sgt_Oddball
      Thumb Up

      I can't recommend this enough

      I've been doing web deving for getting on 10 years (on and off... there was the liquor merchant job for a year that gave me a different perspective and actively encouraged drinking on the job) and as a generalist jobs were pretty much static with not much head room for pay increases.

      Cue 6 months ago I changed to UI development on Java (from ASP/ASP.NET/.NET, a flirt with PHP and starting to tinker with node) and it's been the best decision I've made in a long time. Doubled my pay (seriously how often does that sort of opportunity come up?) and i'm enjoying working again as part of team rather than being a dogs body trying to cover everything. In the meantime ontop of UI/Front end duties I've been tinkering with Java as well and have been supported by other team members to learn more as well as being massively surprised with the volume of modern tooling that works well (mostly..YMMV) with Java considering it's vintage (I'm using it for web development, anything over 3 years is usually considered worthy of museums..apart from IE6/7/8/9/10.. there's a special place in hell reserved for that instead).

      So yes, anyone asks, Java. Everything else can be figured out along the way, and I truly wish I'd been taught it sooner.

    2. andy 103

      @wolfetone

      As someone who has been in your position I've got an alternative that involves no Java at all...

      In PHP roles you are correct that there is a ceiling salary which is lower than in other areas of development. These types of jobs are typically advertised by web agencies, and the market is frankly a little flooded, hence the lower than expected salaries.

      Look into web based Software Engineering roles. Make sure you know more than just PHP - look particularly at frontend development frameworks (Bootstrap, jquery), database management, and web server administration (Apache, etc). If you have all of those skills combined you will get a lot further than just being "a PHP developer".

      There is a bright future in web based application development, and Java-based technology is absolutely awful when it comes to web apps, IMO.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @wolfetone

        "Java-based technology is absolutely awful when it comes to web apps, IMO"

        What do you think all those new fangled hipster bootstrap/angular/ember/FOTM.js GUIs are querying? Protip: it ain't C. The back ends of huge parts of the web run on the JVM, whether Play or Spring or whatever they like. Cranking out REST APIs and abstracting out underlying datastores while providing audit/auth/etc. is *exactly* what Java and its cousins were designed to do.

        Proest of tips: Throw in Just Enough Scala/Java/SQL into the mix of JS techs and call yourself a "full stack" developer, stick another 0 on the end of your glorified graphic designer's salary.

        1. jeffdyer

          Re: @wolfetone

          "Cranking out REST APIs and abstracting out underlying datastores while providing audit/auth/etc. is *exactly* what Java and its cousins were designed to do."

          Rubbish. Java is way older than REST APIs. It was designed to be a general purpose language to replace C and Pascal etc. but specifically to run on all platforms through a virtual machine.

          Try again, youngster.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: @wolfetone

            Because churning out REST interfaces is different from churning out any other industry standard API... how exactly? Of course Java predates REST, that doesn't mean it wasn't designed to solve exactly the challenge REST implementation presents.

          2. Matthew Brasier

            Re: @wolfetone

            Actually, Java was designed to be a language to program set top boxes, it was never designed to replace C/C++ etc. That just kind of happened along the way.

            I guess your younger than you think.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: @wolfetone

              do you mean Java ME? At one point it was THE language for set top boxes ... just curious not being snarky.

              1. Chris Fox

                Re: @wolfetone

                "do you mean Java ME? At one point it was THE language for set top boxes ... just curious not being snarky."

                I think this was a reference to the original purpose of what is now called Java, going back to 1991 when it was part of Sun's set-top box project, and went by the name "Oak". The name was changed to "Java" in 1994/5. Jave ME came later, originally as J2ME in around 1998/9

        2. barbara.hudson

          Re: @wolfetone

          Actually, some of those back ends ARE written in c. The web server I had to write certainly was, we just hid it by having all queries end with a ".php" extension. Like to see anyone crack that by trying to exploit any of the known php or apache bugs.

          Same as if someone tried to do a windows directory list, send them one. After all, it's just a plain ascii file, not a real directory list (which would have revealed it was running on a *nix machine). Bored? Turn their attacks back on their machines, delete a few things ...

          Same as another place, all the queries were processed in c. Made it much easier to detect malformed data by examining it byte-by-byte as it was coming in over the network. Any parameter exceeding the maximum design length, immediately issue a redirect to goatse.cx, farmsex, or any one of 10 nasty sites in a round robin que, then immediately cut the connection without bothering to receive the rest of the data.

          Nasty AND nasty fast.

          Also, a lot of those back end services rely on databases written in c, or on runtimes written in c. And OSes written in c. Even the JRE. Don't knock c.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @wolfetone

          Java certified and +10 years experience here.

          npm beats the crap out of Java EE, srping, etc.

          Still, I am a full stack developer, a certified Oracle DDBB Admin with experience, Oracle J2EE, Jquery + sencha + vue.js ..

          ok, I kind of agree that the money spèaks java now.. but it is way too slow because frameworks are way too big.

          1. 20goto10

            Re: @wolfetone

            Worked with Java for the past 15 years, all around the stack. Also worked with Javascript for the past 5 years, mostly frontend but also some backend work. All in all, a pretty experienced developer with a full stack profile.

            Currently I work as a consultant and there is plenty of work. In that role, my Java experience is a very valuable asset for me. There are pretty of legacy Java projects to ensure me a steady stream of revenue for well beyond the timespan of my professional life. Also, Java tooling and "best practises" being what it is, they are often loaded with accidental complexity requiring high maintenance.

            For side projects of any kind I use nodeJS stacks. The node/npm ecosystem is just insanely productive compared to, say, Java EE. And Javascript, warts and all, stille provides a far less clunky experience than Java IMHO.

            But as a consultant, charging by the hour ... the bloatedness and clunkiness of Java is a very rewarding feature.

        4. Displacement Activity

          Re: @wolfetone

          "What do you think all those new fangled hipster bootstrap/angular/ember/FOTM.js GUIs are querying? Protip: it ain't C. "

          Errr.... protip++... yes it is. Maybe not for you but, in my case, Bootstrap/JS querying C++ and some plain-old-C. The code that implements the CGI/JSON/etc stuff is tiny and trivial compared to the rest of the app, and those SQL APIs generally start life as C anyway.

          And, if you want real money, you'll get twice as much with a Maths degree/C++/Matlab as you will with Java.

          And, if you're currently delivering pizzas, you're a lot more likely to make money with JavaScript than with Java.

      2. Mage Silver badge

        Re: web apps

        Plenty of software development doesn't involve web apps.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: web apps

          "Plenty of software development doesn't involve web apps."

          True, but if it doesn't involve web apps or similar there's a fair chance it won't even involve "tool churn" - no new fangled languages, methods, and processes, no biennial throwing away of everything which is tried tested and proven.

          Where's the advertising and consultancy profit in an approach like that? What on earth would IT Departments, coin-op consultants, etc, do with themselves if people focused mainly on StuffThatWorks rather than mostly on stuff that's new and shiny? There'd probably still be relics like AIX and VMS around. Maybe they are still around ;) - how would we know?

    3. Ian Michael Gumby
      Boffin

      @Wolfetone .... Meh!

      There should be a Meh! Icon.

      Maybe you should go back to school and get an engineering degree. Its not about learning the language, but learning language theory. So you can pretty much pick of any language easily.

      I've never touched Javascript. Why? Because I do the heavy lifting on the back end. Pojo developers are a dime a dozen. Not much call for J2EE. What you need to learn are 3 languages if you don't know Java.

      1) Java

      2) Python

      3) Scala

      All the rest is noise.

      Now if you're really technical, there's C/C++ and Objective-C if your an Apple fanboi.

      Your choice.

      1. Philip Stott

        Re: @Wolfetone .... Meh!

        "All the rest is noise" - what a flippant remark!

        I'm sorry, I'm going to come across as a bit of a git here, but it's justified to prove what crock you're spouting.

        I've spent the last 20 years developing in C, Visual Basic currently C#/.NET. For the last 15 years my contract income hasn't dipped below £120K.

        The best advice I could give any aspiring developer is, yes, pick Java or a n other set of enterprise development tools. Doesn't really matter. What does is picking the type of enterprise you work in, and for the big bucks it has to be investment banks, trading houses, hedge funds, etc.

        That's assuming, of course, all you're interested in is income.

      2. heyrick Silver badge
        Meh

        There should be a Meh! Icon.

        What do you think this is? (except on mobile view) -------->

      3. Charles 9

        Re: @Wolfetone .... Meh!

        PS. There IS a Meh icon. It's the straight face.

      4. kmac499

        Re: @Wolfetone .... Meh!

        " Its not about learning the language, but learning language theory. So you can pretty much pick of any language easily."

        Now this is where I have to disagree. Maybe it's an age thing but I've always found it easy to adsorb principles rather than arbitrary definitions. The language theory is the relatively easy bit, which involves asking, in addition to sequence, selection and iteration, what the did the comp sci bods add into this that is useful?

        The useful things to learn are, of the myriad ways there are to build data structures with objects, inheritance , interfaces etc which ones will lead you down a blind alley into mazes of twisty turny passages. How easy is it to manipulate and navigate data structures? How easily does it allow cool features like some form of macro substitution on the fly?

        Finally is there a set of well established patterns to do the grunt work of reading and writing to datastores and MVC models

        For me the difficult thing is the vocabulary of the language, does this one need an 'Endif', how do I pass by ref, How do I set scope? What's the syntax for multi dimensional arrays? what's the character for a comment? etc etc.

        I would not expect anyone to memorise the nth parameter of every function but to be productive in any language requires fluency. There are undoubtedly people who are Prog-Lang Polyglots I ain't of them.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @wolfetone

      " (except for a 6 month awful relationship with VB.NET)...

      ...but then I read this article and I'm thinking sod it. I'm going to learn Java."

      If you struggled with VB.Net (which for the last time is not VB6 or VBA!!) then you might struggle with Java. If you accept that C# and Java are conceptually similar then ditto VB.Net. Okay the syntax is very different to C# and Java (and more modern IMHO, no bloody terminating archaic semi-colons required!) but conceptually the three languages are very similar and C# and VB.Net are just different sides of the same coin - hence why there are a number of online converters that will convert C# code to VB.Net and visa-versa. Vb.Net basically matches C# feature for feature. Actually, the language syntax is the easiest part, it's understanding the frameworks, the relevant design patterns and all the bloody endlessly changing jargon that's the biggest challenge these days. And just when you feel on top of it, it's all chucked out of the door and something newer and supposedly better comes along - c'est la bloody vie!

  2. CAPS LOCK

    "And, you know, "...

    "And, you know, maybe it’s sometimes worth paying for something that your entire business relies on - just sayin’."

    O'Rly? My experience - FOSS more reliable than prop. software.

    1. Ian Michael Gumby
      Boffin

      Re: "And, you know, "...

      "O'Rly? My experience - FOSS more reliable than prop. software."

      Son, you must not have a strong engineering background, or have been programming for a long time.

      FOSS isn't more reliable. That's a fallacy.

      I've got some embedded code that I wrote for a client that's been running pretty much untouched for almost 30 years. Why? Because when they gave me a spec to design the OS (Custom, IP, and not FOSS) , I wasn't told how fast it had to run, so I was left to my imagination. It was over designed for the time. You don't see that with FOSS.

      Don't get me wrong. I use FOSS. But its no better or worse than today's prop software.

      The larger problem is the dumbing down of the industry.

  3. Elledan
    Coat

    Crippled C++

    After a number of years of programming Java, I have come to realise that Java is merely a regression in programming languages. It's essentially C++-with-only-classes-and-fewer-types. Oh, and you only get pointers (the basic type, no smart pointers) with no fancy pointer arithmetic to ease the pain.

    I can get why COBOL is still doing well today. It's a well-designed language which went through literally decades of improvements to add to its versatility. Much like with JavaScript I have no clue why Java is even popular, however, beyond it being pushed in an unrelenting fashion (oh hi, Oracle!) and having become part of the CEO Buzzword Bingo.

    But hey, C++ is just way too bloody complex (said whilst snickering).

    1. gv

      Re: Crippled C++

      "I can get why COBOL is still doing well today. It's a well-designed language which went through literally decades of improvements to add to its versatility."

      In what parallel universe is this even true?

      1. Ian Michael Gumby
        Boffin

        @GV Re: Crippled C++

        Its called reality snowflake.

        COBOL is something you can teach monkeys and it works well. Legacy systems still exist and if you want to have a skill that pays well, learn the mainframe.

        Also I have taught COBOL programmers OO techniques and they picked it up faster than a bunch of C coders who also didn't believe you could write OO code using C. (You can if you really know what you're doing.) [This was many moons ago. You probably were still in your nappies. ;-P

        Want to stump someone in an interview? If they claim to know C++ ask them what they like and what they hate about C++ versus Java or some other language.

        But Seriously, you need to get out more and look at the entire enterprise.

        In the Big Data space, a COBOL like language makes sense.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Crippled C++

      "Java, I have come to realise that Java is merely a regression in programming languages. It's essentially C++-with-only-classes-and-fewer-types"

      I think that was part of its raison d'etre. An OO applications programming language somewhat simplified. Though it does have its problems - the lack of an unsigned char IMO was a silly ommision as it makes bit twiddling and packet processing harder than it needs to be and the autoboxing hack has always been ugly.

      "But hey, C++ is just way too bloody complex (said whilst snickering)."

      They threw the kitchen sink into C++ around 10 years ago. Now they're throwing in the washing machine, fridge and next doors cat too. It is absurdly over specced and a good example of people not knowing when to leave well alone. And before someone says "Well you don't need to use all the facilities", well no, maybe not on a greenfield project. But if you're updating someone else C++ code you can always gaurantee some obscure usage of the STL or templates that make life a headache. Plus in job interviews they always ask about aspects of C++ buried away in the appendix of Stroustrups book so you need to know it all even if you never use it.

      1. Steve the Cynic

        Re: Crippled C++

        " Plus in job interviews they always ask about aspects of C++ buried away in the appendix of Stroustrups book so you need to know it all even if you never use it."

        Guilty as charged: "Discuss this line of code:" with a single line of code, two words and a semicolon:

        delete this;

        (Not my place to answer it here, and it's about their understanding of things, not about a right or wrong answer.)

        1. stephanh

          Re: Crippled C++

          It's legal, but you better return from the method (o sorry, member function) rather soonish and not access any other member "this" in the mean time.

          Often seen in classes which implement some kind of reference counting.

    3. Ian Michael Gumby
      Devil

      @Elledan Re: Crippled C++

      Sorry mate. C++ isn't that complex. You just have a bunch of careless developers who don't know what they are doing and its a pain in the ass to walk thru their careless code to fix their bugs. I would much rather program in C than C++.

      But to your point. Yes COBOL is alive and well because the mainframe exists and legacy apps continue to run and run well. COBOL is also something which could easily move to the big data space with a few tweaks and updates. (Think of Pig with a data definition section so you don't need to persist the schema in a RDBMS like you do with Hive) Of course COBOL would be redundant since you do have Hive, Pig, Drill, and more tools than you can shake your wee willy at. (Hey its Friday and its funnier than saying stick).

      Java?

      It's portable (no little indians to worry about.) [Endians]

      You don't have to worry about GC

      And its easy. (Dumbing down of languages)

      For bonus points, you can use the old Sun hack and go off heap with your memory as well as do some cross language stuff to C/C++

      Oh and those nasty pointer indirection thingys... fuggit about them. (Pointers and memory stuff is really not that difficult, but it takes time to really learn and use them correctly)

      So, pick your poison. Its all good. (said the waiter at the hotel california) :-)

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Crippled C++

      > Much like with JavaScript I have no clue why Java is even popular

      JavaScript, because it was Lisp with C syntax, cross-platform, in every web browser, and its killer app ws Gmail.

      Java, because it was cross-platform, "safe C", created by legendary Lisp geek James Gosling, and it ran in browsers before JavaScript existed let alone was considered anything but a toy. On the server side, its only real competition was Perl and C. It's still with us because universities adopted it as their main teaching language.

      1. JLV

        Re: Crippled C++

        Not to mention that when it came c. 95 it was the only cross-platform business-capable language alternative to COBOL. By business-capable, I mean for businesses, often end-user, non system programs, where string types abound and super-programmers are scant. C and C++ are not an appropriate choice here, they require too much from the devs & the low-level aspects, esp wrt strings and mem management are a hindrance.

        COBOL had that cornered in 95. Even without hipster web languages, Java would have much more competition if it came in to solve the same problems, the same over-designed Java (TM) way, nowadays. This is a language that took what, 10 yrs, to get a native File Copy? While not that complicated at base its coders often get Design Patterns diarrhea. Nowhere more than in J2EE.

        Go/Swift easily cover the same ground, more elegantly IMHO. J2EE's case is more nuanced, while an overdesigned turd, it is a standardized blueprint for hosting/integrating components together so its a bit of an Unique Selling Point outside of web server type contexts.

        Java is mainstay, quasi-legacy, by virtue the almost-right language at the right time to take over from COBOL. The writer is 100% correct in his premise of economic reward. Still doesn't mean I find it a pleasant, expressive or elegant language though it did help in bringing OOP mainstream.

    5. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Crippled C++

      I have no clue why Java

      Google made the (IMHO fatal) mistake to attach an automated defibrillator to it. It is called Android and (in the process of making Android serviceable) Guava, GSON and the rest of the support train.

      As long as Android and its support train lives so will Java. If it was not for that, it would have been a niche language on the dusty shelf next to Pascal by now.

      1. Mellipop

        Re: Crippled C++

        Google already have the NDK that allows development of android components in C/C++.

        IMHO Google wants to walk away from perennial battles with Oracle over implementing Java APIs.

        As soon as they can, Java will become just another way to write apps on clients in just the same way Java is just one of several languages you can use server side on GAE.

        Java and C# should join COBOL as museum pieces worthy only of morbid interest.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Crippled C++

        The Wago PLC code looks suspiciously like Pascal.

      3. This is my handle
        WTF?

        Re: Crippled C++

        If you check the tiobe index I think you'll find that java peaked in 2004, a good four years before any of us ever heard of Android. My own experience (wrote C in 1984, started switching to java in '96, switched completely in 2000) confirms this, YMMV.

        Lost in the religious wars here is the number of programming concepts java "democratized" (dumbed down if you're a cynic): multi-threading & concurrency, object-orientation, safer memory-indirection, inter-process communication & networking, design patterns, embedded documentation [javadocs], generated unit-tests [junit]). I for one never really adopted C++ because it was easier to write structs & functions than learn about classes & methods; Java did provide those options. With this all built-in to a cross-platform language (no #ifdef LINUX in java), not to mention runtime memory management, boundary-checking and the like, there are of course associated costs. Nothing is free(). :-)

        The language is nothing if not resilient, having morphed from Oak's set-top language, thru webtone "java-stations", thru the darling of the WWW, then the place we put business logic when we abandoned client-server, now REST services and [Android] mobile apps.

        If I had it to do over, I don't think I'd have abandoned java for PHP or Ruby or ... whatever the next fad may be.

        My $0.02.

    6. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Re: Crippled C++

      Java exists because it has safer memory handling. Desktop app developers can laugh this one off, but C++ memory management is really hard on multi-threaded servers. In Java, a hundred threads can continuously grab references to a shared cached object, a dozen of those threads can throw random exceptions due to GIGO, several threads can stall because somebody is on dialup, and at the same time the cache can be updated without ever a single memory leak or pointer bug. C++ can do that too but it requires a tedious level of manual effort and testing.

      It's a double-edged sword. Java can't bulk-allocate structures so it's a mess for image and signal processing where there may be 100 million complex data points.

      1. Richard 12 Silver badge

        Re: Crippled C++

        Somebody who thinks Java can't leak memory? Hate to break it to you, but it does and for basically the same reasons as C++.

        You can write crap software in any language.

        Massive multithreading is easy in C++11 and C11.

        - It wasn't so great before as the STL didn't specify how, so you'd need to use one of the tens of great 3rd party libraries, but many of those also made it very simple. Of course, some places rolled their own of variable quality...

        More importantly, as is scaling the number of threads to the actual hardware you're running on, and pooling them.

        Hundreds of threads is very likely to be much slower than ten threads on commodity hardware. In general, thread pools are so much faster.

    7. SVV

      Re: Crippled C++

      "with no fancy pointer arithmetic to ease the pain."

      Ease the pain? Are you kidding? Have you ever had to maintain some smart arse's convoluted, undocumented use of cheesy pointer arithmetic tricks under pressure?

      Java IS simple. It is meant to be that way as its' main use is for business applications. C++ is complex and multi featured. It is meant for use in very high performance applications. I use both and I like both, even though I understand the not so great aspects of both. Please understand the target audience of languages before engaging in language wars.

      1. a_yank_lurker

        @SVV Re: Crippled C++

        "Please understand the target audience of languages before engaging in language wars." - Absolutely, if used for the problems the language is designed to handle well it's the greatest since sliced bread. Used for unsuitable problems it is a genuine turd. The better question is what types of problems are you focused on and learn the languages of that area and ignore the rest.

        Enterprise is currently Java with some C# and C/C++ with an occasional Python or Ruby bit. Web development Javascript, HTML, CSS, with PHP, Python, and Ruby for the backend depending on the backend framework. Scientific and statistical computing R and Python (mostly due to Numpy and Scipy). Note, the examples are not intended to exhaustive but illustrative of the fact where one sits as developer will influence which languages they think are the most important as they are the languages they see in their area.

      2. Elledan

        Re: Crippled C++

        "Java IS simple."

        The hours I have wasted debugging issues with the JVM's GC (Android and server), as well as untangling multi-layered levels of exceptions, fixing NullPointerExceptions (Null types are a design flaw), and discovering code flow in a Java application using interfaces and injection have made it clear to me that Java is not 'simple'.

        If anything, Java lends itself for the writing of applications which are even less maintainable than if they were written in any other language. I have had more fun debugging C++ code which made heavy use of templates.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Crippled C++

      Java became popular because people wrote useful tools in it, including a browser plug-in.

      JavaScript became popular because the web is popular and it was supported by browsers, which made it very easy to do some of the simple dynamism that people wanted to do.

      But importantly JavaScript is also object-based, built on fast associative arrays, the object model is efficient, it has syntactic flexibility, it allows functions references and the syntax allows for useful brevity. All of that, when combined with the DOM made it relatively easy to deploy complex web applications.

      Internet Explorer allowed VBScript in web pages but its dumbed-down, clumsy syntax didn't stand a chance against JavaScript.

      (But yes, wouldn't it have been so nice if it had supported strict typing.)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny how what goes around...

    20 years ago the kids in tight pants were extolling Java and I was the C/C++ guy looking over his glasses at them going "Meh, VMs, whatever, it'll never catch on, now go play with you GUIs and let me get on with some real coding" :) Similarly Cobol guys did the same thing to me though they had the last laugh - Cobol has dug in in its niche and isn't going anywhere whereas other languages wax and wane.

  5. andy 103
    WTF?

    Java is absolutely crap for web applications

    I don't know why Java even gets a mention when it comes to web applications. To any competent web developer (i.e. those of us who have used other non-Java technologies) it's an absolute joke.

    The article mentions developing a mortgage application. Whatever the requirements of that, I guarantee, a Java-based web framework would yield absolutely appalling results - in terms of bloat, time taken to develop, maintanence costs, etc - even than using the simplest of PHP frameworks.

    The only people who disagree with this are people who don't know any better, people who think Java is the shit because that's what they've spent their career working with.

    If you're a developer or software engineer, you really need to realise what year it is, where things are going (i.e. web-based applications and software) and learn some new skills.

    Java for web applications? Think I'd rather cut my balls off with a rusty knife.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

      "- even than using the simplest of PHP frameworks."

      I'm not Javas biggest fan, but PHP is a toy language for toy sites. Anyone who even suggested using for something hardcore like mortgages or any kind of financial site where serious money and peoples futures are at stake should be shown the door. The fact that you think PHP is a suitable solution yet think yourself a "comptetent web developer" shows the general level of expertise in the webdev community. Frankly you guys should stick to making pretty pages in HTML and javascript and leave the serious backend programming to people who've had appropriate training and have a clue.

      1. andy 103

        Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

        @boltar - You might want to consider some of the applications and services which are based on PHP before you go mouthing off. Seriously, go and have a look, it's not 2000 anymore and things have moved on somewhat. A "toy language" indeed... utter rubbish. They certainly don't pay me toy money to develop using it! And as for "making pretty pages"... that's front-end development, not PHP. Idiot.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

          "@boltar - You might want to consider some of the applications and services which are based on PHP before you go mouthing off. "

          Sure, a lot use it. So what? A lot of sites used to do backend in Perl in cgi days. That didn't make it the right choice either. There's always the pressure to get projects done quick and PHP has a quick turnaround compared to Java or C++, but that doesn't make it the best choice for runtime efficiency, security or scalability. In fact its never the best choice for any of those.

          "They certainly don't pay me toy money to develop using it!"

          Since when did someones salary equate to the suitability of the product they were using?

          1. andy 103

            Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

            "Since when did someones salary equate to the suitability of the product they were using?"

            I'm not even going to carry this on because clearly you have no idea about modern application development in a web-based environment. To answer your last question though, this particular article is about careers and employment.

            You've already acknowledged an advantage of PHP in terms of rapid development. In terms of PHP's suitability, I beg to differ, but as it's what I've done professionally for years and also used Java for web apps, I'm pretty well versed in making that call.

            The end result is that you have a language which - if used properly - is great for web application development, and I've confirmed I get a significant salary for making applications with it. In terms of my career then, why would I want to use a language which makes things more difficult?! PHP's simple and get's the job done, whilst also getting paid a lot to use it? Yes, I'm fine with this!

            Maybe you like pissing into the wind and get a boner over reading about data types... but some of us have a career AND time to have a life outside what we do professionally.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

              PHP is anything but simple, at either the language or platform level, particularly when you've got to intermingle it with Hack and HHVM to get anything approaching acceptable performance out of it.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

              "In terms of my career then, why would I want to use a language which makes things more difficult?! PHP's simple and get's the job done"

              And people wonder why sites get hacked. I rest my case.

              "whilst also getting paid a lot to use it? Yes, I'm fine with this!"

              Webdevs don't tend to get paid that much compared to other areas of development so I suspect your large salary is actually rather meh compared to someone who does serious backend C++ or java development but hey, you want to play a dick waving contest on your own and think you've made it then knock yourself out. Whatever gives you validation.

              "Maybe you like pissing into the wind and get a boner over reading about data types"

              Yeah, who needs strong typing that can find errors at compile time. Much better to have exceptions thrown at runtime eh? *sigh* Another know-nothing script kiddy.

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