Java was the new hotness when I was in the middle of my comp sci degree. The biggest benefit I found was javadocs. Other languages had shit documentation that usually didn’t match reality in comparison.

People aren’t writing new projects in COBOL. It’s mostly to maintain 40+ year old systems. Unless you’re working in the bank sector, it’s unlikely you will write a program in COBOL.

OOP was hype during the 90s. Schools adapted their curriculum to this trend. So they needed a programming language for this, and Java became the choice. C++ is too tricky as a first language.

The result is that a lot of people knew Java, which means it’s a good choice of language if you want to recruit programmers.

I believe most of Java’s success was luck. It released at the perfect time.

Don't forget this small sector called government. Loads of Cobol there.

OOP makes so much sense. What happened?

I used Java years ago for Android dev, but stopped when I stopped doing that. Every once in a while I'll get the itch to work on a new project, and always wonder if Java would be a good idea.

My hesitance is that I don't trust Oracle (and don't know to what extent they're involved nowadays), I'm not familiar enough with the ecosystem to know what is legacy crap to avoid, and I think it's generally seen as an uncool language, and I'm way too cool to be taking such risks.

If you want to do something java like, try Kotlin. Its a more modern take on java and not developed by Oracle

The AbstractionBubbleFactory popped

One Rich Asshole Called Lary Ellison

Java is IMHO one of the most underrated platforms outside of enterprise environments.

Most people also forget, that Java is not only a language, but also a platform, an ecosystem and active research is applied to many parts of Java.

Concerning Oracle: OpenJDK is actively supported by very different but big and capable companies (IBM, Amazon, Eclipse Foundation...). The quality of the language, libraries and documentation needs people which are payed to work on this, full time.

Bring to this the free IDEs one can get for Java - Eclipse and Netbeans are a little bit old school, but offer everything to build/debug and develop complex software.

Java is not my favorite programming language, but when I want to write interesting software and ensure it will be running for the next decade w/o significant changes, Java is really hard to beat.

Of course, in hindsight we know how to do a lot of things better as they were done in Java. Still, what other open source Language/Platform/documentation with the backing of capable companies and really independent and interoperable builds are out there?

One last note to all people which were damaged by Java in university or school: Usually the teachers/professors/lecturers have no real world experience of software development besides the usually university projects, and for the usual university projects which basically means getting small to midsize projects to run Java is total overkill.

Don't confuse this with real world software projects in the industry, which are mission critical and need to work a decade from now on. Java was always a bread and butter language, but one which learned from other languages and even the verbosity makes sense, once one dives into code written a few years back by another person.

I liked Java a lot more before Oracle acquired Sun. I've used Oracle databases enough to hate Oracle with the passion of a supernova.

Java was stagnating under Sun, unfortunately. I hate to say it, but Oracle probably saved Java.

Open jdk is where it's at

Sure, cause c# doesn’t have any original feature’s whatsoever

/s

Kotlin is very similar to C# in my opinion.

It’s a happy middle ground for me

Lary Ellison is one of the richest men in the world right and owns some kind of private island or something that he bought basically after showing his shares of Oracle stock?

java was my 5th language, having just missed it as the AP CS language in highschool by a year. oddly i could not get behind such a massive standard library having come from BASIC, Pascal C++, ASM, VHDL. now after 30 years of programing i write Java web services for a living. feels strange.

Show me an Android app written in Java, and I’ll show you the line of developers ready to rewrite it in Kotlin.

In a first year computer science course at uni I can say they teach us Python, Java, and C, all with slightly different use cases.

Lol, as Javanese, It's funny that Javanese ethnic name -> Javanese coffee -> Javanese programming language.

People still keep thinking that I was a programmer or making a typo of Japanese everytime I mention I speak Javanese.