There’s always been a considerable level of criticism against Java from a big sector of our industry. This criticism has been mostly focused on Java’s verbosity and the amount of boilerplate code it generates in many cases without need. Although I’ve always liked Java, I couldn’t say that these allegations are wrong. It’s indeed true that Java’s verbosity and its amount of clutter can become very annoying on multiple occasions. However, most of the time, we have to accept that we don’t live in a perfect world, and in most cases, we have to accept the lesser of two evils. So yes, Java wasn’t perfect, we all know that, but the main question is why nothing was done before to address these concerns.

In my personal opinion, the only reason why changes took so long is that there wasn’t enough competition for Java, and things were right as they were. The Java language was dominating the market probably due to the lack of serious competitors and the big efforts made by Sun first and then Oracle afterward.

The strong type safety provided by Java and some of its characteristics as a well-structured language made it a very popular language for big projects. Using Java, it’s generally more difficult for things to get really out of hand. Also, one of the main characteristics of Java — that it’s a multi-platform language that runs on its own virtual machine — made it a perfect match for many organisations. If you add its inherent capability of performing automatic performance optimisations through its famous JIT compiler, something that minimises in many cases the effects of badly written code, then you have a pretty solid set of reasons to use Java.

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