Like the article I hear Spring Boot here mentioned again. I also really hate the annotation culture. This is big in Spring Boot, and more common in Java since it is so damn verbose.
It is not inherent in Java though, and the Kotlin "developer culture" seems to be much more annotation averse (as we all should be).
You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go? Even on a vanilla language to vanilla language basis, but let alone against something like Spring Boot that does almost everything for you in a typical CRUD application.
Annotations are declerative shorthands. How is a trivial spring boot endpoint with methods with a single @GET line above them denoting the endpoint verbose?
What about a single SQL query in an annotation above an interface method's name? Will your whole implementation of connect to db, execute query, iterate over the resulting rows, and convert them to some native object/struct shorter than.. 2 lines?
> You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go?
I might agree if you're speaking about Java since ~11 or so.
One of my biggest complaints about Java, especially before the lambda syntax caught on, was how many extra files it made me create. I felt like every project had lots of wrapper classes, and people would make a make a file for each class.
You could argue that that was "bad" Java and they should have nested the classes, and that's fair enough, but it certainly wasn't uncommon Java. It artificially makes the language feel way too verbose if you have ten files more than would be necessary in a comparable language.
Once people started to embrace the lambda syntax, I feel that Java got immediately more fun to write; you weren't constantly creating one-off instantiations of interfaces or classes (well, at least not explicitly anyway), and the language felt considerably more streamlined.
Java 21 is actually one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in quite awhile in the tech world, in that I'm actually having fun writing Java. Sealed interfaces and record patterns make some code considerably more pleasant, and I actually have been writing Java in my free time, which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago.
> which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago.
I think a lot of people are noticing the changes Java has had in the previous years. The language has made a lot of improvements, and I feel that the mind set of the community has changed. The old enterprise way of factories and unnecessary abstractions have lost a lot of popularity, and is mostly still alive in legacy software/teams and universities who have not yet caught up.
Even Spring Boot is now a valid approach for getting sh*t done for startups. There are of course frameworks that are more light weight, or you can start from scratch and choose your own libraries to keep the size down. But SB is simply good enough for most use cases, and even supports native compilation now.
I still am not a huge fan of the Spring stuff, I have to use Spring Streams for work and I think it’s unpleasant to work with. It seems like the rest of the world has much more fun configuring YAML files than I do. I had to use Spring Boot at a previous job and it wasn’t for me, but honestly I really just hate working on web stuff.
But that’s obviously not the language’s fault. There are frameworks in Java that I think are great, like Vert.x; hell even going super low-level with NIO is straightforward enough if I really need control of HTTP stuff.
The stuff I really have the most fun working with is concurrent and distributed programs, and I think Java (or at least the JVM) is pretty hard to beat with that. Vert.x, Disruptor, and even the built-in JVM concurrency libraries (other than synchronized) are excellent; they have a Just Works quality to them.
And nowadays, GraalVM is good enough with its native compilation that you can avoid the long startup times and keep the memory under control, so it even is reasonably ok for custom command line tools.
Sometimes --in Spring Boot-- they hook different systems up with eachother: this makes the framework very "magic". I really dont like that: I want to be able to CTRL-click my way to understand how everything works!
I think this is why most criticism of Java sounds weird to me. I've used Java since 1.3-ish and I've never used a web framework or an annotation and I think I've used a factory once (I think there's one in Swing and I recall thinking it was a stupid design choice).
"Coupling by annotation" culture (which diminishes many of the benefits of using a typed language, as it pushes coupling to runtime and by means of reflection) IS inherent to SpringBoot. Hence my distaste for it.
Annotations were adopted to cut down on the massive amounts of XML that was used to configure everything beforehand, still a lot was loosely wired for "extensibility" and people have learned that it was 99% overengineering so that's cut down these days in various ways.
It is not inherent in Java though, and the Kotlin "developer culture" seems to be much more annotation averse (as we all should be).