Nithin Bekal About

Defending Java

27 Jan 2014

A couple of days ago I found myself defending Java. Java! I know.

When I started programming professionally 4 years ago, trolling Java was becoming a popular sport, especially in the startup and dynamical languages world. I’ve often joined in myself.

Now, when I try to look at Java with a less biased eye, I see some amazing languages and technologies built on the Java platform. Clojure, Scala, Android’s Dalvik VM, the Play framework, Jruby, Hadoop, Lucene… the list goes on. JVM must have done something right for all this to have happened.

So when I heard someone exclaim “I hate Java”, I couldn’t help but be reminded of me a few years ago, saying pretty much the same things.

I still don’t use any a JVM based language for development. For the few weeks that I had to use Java, I didn’t enjoy writing code very much. I still think Java isn’t the most elegant language. But I’ve stopped complaining about Java with eloquent arguments like “it sucks”. After all, the JVM exists because of this “ugly” language.

Let’s show JVM the respect it deserves. It’s earned it.

Hi, I’m Nithin! This is my blog about programming. Ruby is my programming language of choice and the topic of most of my articles here, but I occasionally also write about Elixir, and sometimes about the books I read. You can use the atom feed if you wish to subscribe to this blog or follow me on Mastodon.