> there's a huge industry of people critiquing Java and OOP but misdiagnosing the problems as technical rather than sociological.

I totally agree. I have worked on applications that would have collapsed under their own weight if it wasn't for Java. The strong type system, stable runtime and standard library APIs, as well as great tooling allows code to live far longer than it would in some other language ecosystems.

However, don't make the mistake of dismissing all of the criticism. The truth is often nuanced, and OOP/Java does have some serious downsides and footguns. There is room for both criticism and praise.

Ultimately, great systems aren't created by throwing a language and problems at a collection of random people. Great systems happen when good decisions are consistently made over time, and those are context dependent.

Java complexity is also an artifact of Java being used in large complex systems. People are really complaining about how hard programming is. There are many types of large scale systems where I would only code it using the JVM, everything else is a nightmare. Big tech companies largely feel the same

There is an all-time great quote from Bjarne Stroustroup when asked about how many people hated C++

> There are two types of programming languages: The ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

So many of these articles are written by people with no CS background who then had a couple stints short stints programming and then overnight pivoted to being expert consultants. They don't really have experience building or maintaining large complex systems. I am really curious who hires them. Most of them will have significantly less experience than the senior members of a successful team, and often less relevant education.

No one is more confident in their abilities than a boot camp grad.

> There are many types of large scale systems where I would only code it using the JVM, everything else is a nightmare.

I’ve seen more than one lifetime’s worth of nightmare code written in Java. I agree with the GP commenter - I don’t think the problem is Java (the language) so much as the culture surrounding it. The Java programmers I’ve worked with (all smart people) seem addicted to solving all problems my writing more Java. More interfaces (most of which just have a single implementor). More classes. More files. More abstractions. You pay a massive tax for that any time you edit your software - since inevitably you're going to end up unpicking hundreds of lines of code that could have been two if statements.

I’ve never seen this abstraction vomit disease be quite this bad in software written in other languages. You can find a bit of it in C#, C++, go and Python. But not as bad as Java. In typescript and rust, most of the code I work with focuses a lot more on directly solving the actual problem at hand.

I don’t think the problem is the language itself. Java is a fine language. But for some reason, it’s become a magnet for a certain kind of developer that I frankly never want to work with. Developers who would never use 5 lines of code when 100 would do. Developers who abstract first and understand the problem they’re solving later. It’s disgusting.

> I’ve never seen this abstraction vomit disease be quite this bad in software written in other languages. You can find a bit of it in C#, C++, go and Python. But not as bad as Java

That’s just your personal experience with these languages. I would even go as far to say that there is some survivorship bias — certain projects might have survived in java that collapsed under its own weight in some other platform, making the “complex nightmare projects” overrepresented in java, even though it is due to a positive thing.

Sure. Unless you have data, we’re only talking about our personal experience.

But there’s plenty of large, apparently healthy, projects written in other languages. The Linux kernel (C). Chrome (C++). Unreal engine (C++). Postgres. And so on.

My claim (and criticism of the culture around java) is that I’ve seen a lot of large Java projects at medium to large companies which didn’t need to be large projects at all. And wouldn’t be if they were built in a different style. The claim that building verbosely is good is almost never justified with data, and always seems deeply suspect to me. My instincts often say “I could rewrite this monolith with 2 smart developers in 3 weeks”. After 30+ years writing software, I’ve learned to trust my instincts.

I have often observed that Java is great because it solves organizational problems. Strong and static types, interfaces and most of all, javadoc, were miraculous for conveying intent to integrators and maintainers. Even seemingly insignificant things like a naming convention for packages was extremely useful. A lot of the features trumpeted in Java when it was new, like abstract classes or checked exceptions, were adopted religiously at first but fell out of favor a long time ago. Interfaces and interface inheritance is extremely useful.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with Java the language. Java the community is what sucks. You had a few bloggers get popular and then a bunch of devs trying to make names for themselves would ape what they said, compound a few years and you have the mess people like to complain about.

Happens with a lot of language communities. C#, good grief, not much better than Java. Go(lang) community's favorite two words are "idiomatic Go". You can't read any post without seeing those two words. Go has like what, seven keywords. Let it go, man.