Yes, i was part of the cult in my early days as programmer. I would endlessly create abstractions over abstractions. But the whole madness started for valid reasons.
Im the early days of Java on the web, you had servlets and JSP. Servlets were miserable to write, and JSPs were basically the java interpretation of having a PHP. Those were the days before JSON and yaml, when XML was king.
So people wanted to abstract their way out of JSP and XML, so they created layers to isolate the nasty parts and make it easier to write actual Java code. So a few ideas emerged/frameworks: ORMs, EJBs, Struts, JSF, template frameworks, and finally Spring which was the lightweight one, if you can believe it. A lot of those ideas coming from the Java world were exported into various other languages in a selective ways.
People experienced with various patterns and frameworks. Eventually Spring won, and then Spring started to use annotations, JSON became more popular, etc., the code became less and less verbose.
Some Java developers never made the mental jump and are still creating huge piles of abstractions because this is what they’ve learned from their seniors.
Yes it does, the only parts where Java doesn’t shine are usually some advanced features that are nightmarish for people who are building tools and libraries:
The type system is so 90s and it’s kept like that for backwards compatibility.
Generics having type erasure is again an improvisation for the sake of backwards compatibility. It makes writing generic code in conjunction with Reflection painful.
The lack of control for the memory layout. I mean in most cases you dont need full control, but there are use cases where it’s literally impossible to do optimisations that are easy to do in C/C++. You must have faith in the JVM and JIT.
Integration with native code is cumbersome.
Other than that Java is fine for most backend work you need to do, except probably for Real Time Processing apps where every millisecond count, but even there there are ways.
You use Java not for the languages itself, but for the tooling and the ecosystem.
For personal projects and prototypes i believe it’s fine, but when you consume the electricity of mid-size countries just because you prefer to write your production code in convenient languages don’t lecture others about ecology and climate change (i am not refering to you).
Developers should go back writing efficient code in lower level programming languages to stop wasting CPU cycles for stupid reasons, like not wanting to use types, or something more stupid than that.
It’s a little curse to be remotely passionated about programming and be a programmer nowadays. Some companies make it extremely dull and toxic with all their additional requirements and managerial practices. But there’s hope, there are good companies or teams, and eventually if you stay long enough you will find your place.
That was my case.
The only lesson you need to learn is to make distinction between your interests, side projects and hobbies and the actual work you need to do ar work. If they overlap that’s amazing, if not you need to adapt. You need to give the company what the company wants (so you can get paid), and to yourself what you want, so you can be fulfilled.
For me the experience is different, but to be honest i am spending more time in the terminal and the browser than notifying what the DE is actually missing.
I mean, i have panel on the bottom with the open apps, a few shortcuts, the network manager, the Bluetooth manager and the calendar. I am not missing anything.
I also run Mint, and things were extremely stable for as long I can remember.