this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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I remember Java being seen as the best thing ever in the 90's, and it was considered "cool" at that time. So cool even, that it became the programming equivalent of a hammer, every coding challenge looked like a nail for which you could use it.
It's a cycle all popular languages go through. First only experimental applications and super opinionated programmers use it. Then everyone wants to use it for everything. Then it finds a niche where it excels and settles.
I remember Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript going through those phases as well. Currently, everything is Rust.
I'm still wondering what Java's niche is, it seems like it does everything, but nothing particularly well. I guess it found a home on Android, but I don't think that's because it's particularly well-suited for it.
Show me an Android app written in Java, and I’ll show you the line of developers ready to rewrite it in Kotlin.
Sure, and Kotlin is largely syntax sugar for Java. It's certainly nicer, but the semantics are largely the same.
You must not write much Kotlin then? It’s far more than sugar when a language fixes core issues in another.
It’s a modern, statically typed language that addresses many of Java’s longstanding limitations with robust type safety, expressive functional features, coroutine-based concurrency, and extensibility — all integrated natively. Interoperability with Java is a strength, not a sign of dependency.
Calling Kotlin merely syntactic sugar is like saying Swift is just Objective-C with prettier syntax — it misses the deep improvements in language design, safety, and developer experience.
I've written a fair amount, enough to know it's a significant improvement on Java, but that it still suffers from the unnecessary abstraction in the standard library. And that's pretty much my main problem with Java.
Swift is a different story because the main issue with Objective C is the syntax.