alt Hacker NewsSeeing as we're having a $LANG war, after 15 years in JVM land, I moved to a Python / Go shop, and fuck I miss Java.
Not so much the language (although modern Java is pretty slick), but the stuff surrounding it.
* No typosquatting issues because every package has a group id verified by real humans and DNS TXT records.
* JMX as a standardized mechanism of exposing ways to interact with running code / expose metrics. (Even if you have to deal with the stupid ass protocol where you have to connect using a DNS identity the JMX server recognizes)
* Logging libraries that give people running the code control over what gets logged and how, not the developers (looking at you Golang, wtf is with your logging approach where devs have to explicitly consider the fact that you might want to run logging at DEBUG and code it into your start up args?)
* The ability (via JMX) to set, at runtime, one particular logger in one class or file to a desired logging level without restarting the application.
* The performance of the JVM.
* The vast FOSS ecosystem.
* Not having to fight C build chains for that one dependency that's using CGo or a Python wrapper around a C lib that no wheel supports for your given tuple of Python version, OS, and architecture.
Honestly, as someone who is a self-taught developer who taught himself in Python, I thought I was coming home to my first love.
Turns out, I really hate the horrible things you can do in Python - looking at you Django, don't be so dynamic your brains fall out - and really dislike the experience of trying to run a Go service compared to a JVM service.
Java and its ecosystem is just good at getting shit done in a predictable manner at both the dev level and ops level.
> * No typosquatting issues because every package has a group id verified by real humans and DNS TXT records.
While I think this is a huge boon, have you ever published a package on the Maven Central repository? I must confess I haven't in a few years now, but when I did until ~3 years ago it was a major pain in the ass. And every release again.
I think there's something to say about Go's model where the package is just in some Git hosting and a release is just creating a tag. As a package maintainer, this is just pure bliss compared to the Maven thing.
> and really dislike the experience of trying to run a Go service compared to a JVM service.
What are you running into specifically? I have the complete opposite experience. With Go, 1 small binary comes out that I can run anywhere (and put into a distroless container), whereas with Java I have to find a way to somehow run a full JVM (most often with (large parts of) an OS too).
Perhaps you're alluding to the things you can do with JMX, but I have never really seen much benefit in that. I found it trivial to add similar functionalities with internal HTTP endpoints easily. But since I don't have much experience in this particular area, probably I'm missing something.