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0 pointsd4rkph1b3r10y ago0 comments

Eh, most of my post was an emotional response because of my hatred of the java language. Your reasoning I mostly agree with.

I do agree, the JVM is a solid language choice. I also don't think going with too esoteric of a language is a good thing. Probably a little early to bet a company on Idris or Ceylon.

Still, I apologize for my tone. Let me give you purely anecdotal information about me, so you can at least see where I'm coming from with regards to my anti-java stance.

After doing java/C# for many many years, I will not do it again. I'm much more productive in Scala/F#/ML, it's more pleasant to use, and I believe the average programmer using those languages ends up being a different caliber than the java programmers.

There are absolutely good Java programmers. They just probably work at Google or Facebook and you'll be competing with Google. I would take less money (and have, though not too much less) to not work at Google because I get to use a functional language.

shrug

If a startup is using java, I think to myself 'why java? why not Scala, F#, or C# at the very least?'. Usually the answer is 'scala/F# programmers are too hard to find', but that's not really true, what they mean is they're not willing to pay the 20% premium for them. That's a strong indicator that a start up doesn't value talent.

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autoreleasepool10y ago

> Still, I apologize for my tone.

It's all good! I've had the same heat of the moment responses on here, so I get it. But thanks anyways.

> If a startup is using java, I think to myself 'why java? why not Scala, F#, or C# at the very least?'. Usually the answer is 'scala/F# programmers are too hard to find', but that's not really true, what they mean is they're not willing to pay the 20% premium for them. That's a strong indicator that a start up doesn't value talent.

Definitely. If I chose the JVM or (blanking) the Microsoft VM I would not limit myself to the object oriented languages for those platforms. I was under the impression that using multiple languages was a given, but apparently not? I wouldn't know, I'm doing iOS right now (hence the username). I graduated fairly recently, so I can only go off of what I've read.

So, I would probably do Java and Scala together if that was possible. I really haven't looked into it. My startup was completely hypothetical.

lowmagnet10y ago

Might I suggest starting with Java, but moving into Kotlin after getting the basic syntax of Java down? I have a good feeling about the language after translating a system of classes to it recently. About 60% of the code vanished, and working in it let me free up a few concepts for the resulting java code after doing my thinking in Kotlin.

Most of the stuff Kotlin does, absent much nicer functional syntaxes, I can do in Java 8 already. I think Kotlin does a better job at expressing it. I especially like the first-class nature of functions, and I know I'm just in the early days of understanding it.

d4rkph1b3rOP10y ago

Why kotlin and not scala? Kotlin is like Scala--, in addition to not really having a job market.

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