My Journey to Appreciating Java in 2025 - DEV Community

Occasionally, I tried exploring Java but avoided diving deeper. Writing System.out.println("Hello World") just to print a single line felt unnecessarily verbose. On top of that, there was widespread negativity toward Java from YouTube content creators. People were constantly talking about Rust, Go, Ruby on Rails, and Zig, leaving Java to feel like an outdated relic. … - **Debugging Frustrations:** Now the first pain point for me was the fact that to make any changes I had to compile the class file and replace it in an .ear file and restart Tomcat server, the whole process would take about 5 mins. It was frustrating. In NodeJS I just had to use nodemon to get the changes reflected. - **Understanding OOP code:** Getting used to read OOP (Object Oriented Programming) based code was new to me. It got confusing sometimes, classes extending, implementing and what not. - **The Perception of Obsolescence:** My overall perception was that no one is starting new projects in Java in 2024. The most of the resources I find online are pretty outdated, they might be relevant but in JavaScript, you'll always find the most fresh content out there. ## Living with the Pain ### The pain of Debugging - If you aren't familiar above is a sample image of how stack trace in Java looks like. Initially it was really scary to search in the log file of 50K lines and seeing a lot of caused by chains. The above image paints a nice picture of how debugging in Java can be sometimes. but with time I realised that the useful message is in the bottom most caused by chain mostly. - But sometimes the root cause might be wildly unrelated to the error thrown but this is not something specific to Java, I have faced issues like this javascript as well. - I learned patience and to analyse problems deeply before taking any action to avoid the tedious process of compiling class files and replacing them in the ear archives deployed on Tomcat. ### Java has Evolved but has your organisation? One major feature of Java is its excellent backward compatibility. While this ensures stability, it also means that organizations tend to avoid updating older systems. For instance: - Using XML-based configurations for Spring Beans. - Relying on Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). - Employing Ant for complex build processes. These older practices can make development unnecessarily complex. Modern tools like Spring Boot and Gradle are far more developer-friendly, yet many companies stick to the old ways. 🥲 … I believe that recent versions have picked up a lot of modern features (e.g. Functional Programming / FP style constructs a la map/filter/reduce etc) - but I'm not following it anymore, there's no incentive, and I don't really have a reason to. ... Ignoring the quarkus, spring, kotlin palliatives I think the main issue is the OOP itself, modern systems are less "heavy hierarchy of classes designed ahead by great luminaries" and more "dynamic smaller systems that can be upgraded on the go". Java works for the second as well, but seems clunkier