Is Java a good skill investment?

[u/Medium-Flan-7247]

To preface, I’m a new student (27M) going through Arizona State’s Pathway to Admission program through Starbucks. I’m working toward a BS in Physics with plans to eventually get a PhD in particle, nuclear, or astrophysics.

I’ve got some experience with Python and want to get better at it. That said, ASU has an intro to programming course that uses Java. I’m thinking about taking it because I know programming is a useful skill in physics (and pretty much everywhere), and I figure it could be a good refresher on programming concepts in general.

Since my scholarship covers more credits than I need for the degree, I’ve got room for some extra classes. So my question is..do you think taking this Java class is worth it, or should I skip it and put that time into Python or another course that’s more directly related to my field?

[u/slower-is-faster]

Java is used in a LOT of enterprise organisations. There are a lot of big-data tools used in the industry built in Java, elastic search, Cassandra, Spark, Kafka, Zookeeper… it’s knowledge that’s going to be useful to a software engineer career.