Tom Ritchford
1 min readNov 13, 2023

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Skeptical.

Oh, all the features you list exist and are good things, but I haven't seen a job involving Java outside "enterprise applications" for well over a decade now.

Search, data science, cryptocurrencies (gah), high-frequency trading, AI: areas that have been extremely popular in the last decade or two, which have almost no Java presence.

And I assure you, people won't hire you based on the "skill of the developer" if you don't have experience in the language they are developing in and its ecosystem.

And finally, there's Oracle, which owns Java, and is an old and sleepy company but of proven rapacity. I am not the only person who would be resistant to doing business with them.

I moved from C++ to Java in the 90s, and it was great, but I haven't written a line of Java since 2008 and I don't expect ever to do so again.

Java is a fine language, don't get me wrong, and I wish we had these cool features in the language when I was working in it, but I do feel its day is over. I'd love to be wrong, though.

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