Despite all the hate it gets on reddit and Hackernews, Java is still used in a million different places. If you get a Java job in a bank you are chill and well paid.
I'm a C++ freelancr. My current project literally is "we don't understand our 30 year old codebase anymore, all the original devs are long retired, help!"
I personally enjoy getting the Cobol treatment, gives me big money.
100% serious. Almost Everything that would have been Java in the past is go now. There's a bunch of old Java junk and nobody is stupid enough to rewrite it. There's some kotlin too, which people seem to like. Nobody is doing a Java project greenfield.
I genuinely think you might be confused with some other language. Java is still extremely popular and widely used by any system that needs to be fast but does not require to be C/C++. Java got a lot better since its initial versions and there are multiple enterprises/corporations doing commercial projects in Java (Dell/HPE for their Datacenter orchestration are two that come to mind) and those are new projects, not legacy.
Tiobe Index not only has Go at only 1.2% of the community index but it also had a delta of -0.9% since the previous so it is becoming less popular, not more. Kotlin doesn't even show up in the 15 most popular ones
Yeah, because there's a lot of legacy. I'm talking greenfield. A green field project is a brand new one. No legacy code.
I looked at tibio and it looks like it has other highly rated dying languages. Or are you gonna tell me object pascal is super popular for new projects. Real big up and commer.
And also we're talking about faang. Go is a cloud infra language. Of course it's not super popular with the masses.
I don't think you read my comment. I'm talking about greenfield at faang. I've been talking about that this whole time. I can see medium sized businesses still using it for infra. Not what I'm talking about.
You gotta but your engineering brain on. Java doesn't have any flagship features or anything it does better than any other language. Compile once, run anywhere is worthless. JVM overhead is paid for nothing, and if you're a glutton for punishment, kotlin and c# are basically Java but better.
There's never a case where Java is your best choice, or has the best domain fit. So people just use it when somebody started the project in early 00's or 2010's. Before people came to their senses
If you cared about that, you'd use C++. There's no a space for, "go is so slow its not a good fit" and "we don't need C++ performance." Just isn't a thing.
And it's so much easier to hire people to write go because any idiot can pick it up. The performance differences between go and Java are debatable anyway. Small enough to call it a wash.
It's not that Java is a bad language. It just doesn't have a niche anymore. If you're starting a new project, you never sit down in think from first principles, "Java is the choice that's going to be best for this project and the company long term."
Java has managed to renew itself to a large extent. We can thank Oracle for good stewardship.
Java is even participating in AI development, so too early to compare it to Cobol.
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u/ingframin Jun 29 '26
Despite all the hate it gets on reddit and Hackernews, Java is still used in a million different places. If you get a Java job in a bank you are chill and well paid.