I think it has been over 10 years since I wrote my first ‘Hello World’ in Java and this week I became certified in Java by Oracle.
A few co-workers were putting together a study group so I joined in. I am a sucker for some social geekery.
I have a love hate relationship with Java.
I Love:
- that there are so many things out there written in Java. Java has a huge resource pool to draw from, including code, applications, tutorials and people.
- that the JVM is being used for tons of new and creative things.
- that it does a lot of stuff well.
I Hate:
- that it is harder then it needs to be.
- the community isn’t innovating much lately.
- that Larry seems to be set on destroying anything good about it.
- eclipse and generally any windows desktop app written in java.
Well off to learn some more Ruby 
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Matt
4 months ago
My main “hate” of Java is the shear (apparent) bloat that has grown around the language. I guess that’s not Java’s fault, but the sheer number of services, frameworks, build environments, configurations, test frameworks and tools available is daunting to say the least. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure many of those “frameworks” are wonderful, but for someone starting out in the language you spend months just getting started – before you even write a single line of code. Heck, the fact that you NEED to write your code using an IDE is enough to scare me away (well you don’t need to – but it’s a lot harder without one). Oh, and don’t get me started on all the XML needed
The other gripe are the number of programmers coming from college who only learned Java at school. These kids know all the ins and outs of that language (including all the points above), but don’t know the first thing about how hardware works on a computer, how basic data structures work, how memory works, the difference between passing by reference vs value and so on. Call me old school, but when I went to college we learned C, assembly, Prolog and then by the final year we could pick up C++ or Java on our final year project. Current kids, it appears, have no clue about the fundamentals of software engineering and computers. Sure, I don’t want to blame the tool (Java) for this, but something is very wrong when a large software engineering organization I won’t mention can’t find any new grads that can code in C.