The main reason behind Java's success has always been the community and it's ecosystem. Once you learn basics you literally can code very good things with ease using a huge number of examples/solutions present on web.

The user base kind of helps the developers find the fixes way too easily compared to any other language.

I doubt it is ever going to lose it's popularity as Java is very good to accept good changes(although slowly). The best thing about java is it provides code stability and backward compatibility and this is the reason it will thrive even more.

Pretty disingenuous comparison in the Annotation section.

The annotated version is more terse because he's showing its usage. For the non-annotation version he's showing the implementation.

Don't undercut stability as a reason for popularity. Amazon's Coretto JDK has an advertised LTS of ten years.

I don't care much for Java. However, if you want a performant GCed language with a top tier ecosystem JVM languages must be in contention and there aren't many other viable choices.

I have a question for those of you who have worked on java..or considered working on java ..and ultimately did golang or something.

what would make you choose java :

1. is it a better framework than spring boot

2. is it a better tooling like heroku or something for java

3. is it better community & programming paradigms ? I once asked a question "can i write a java api using all variables as public" and got flamed pretty badly. Do people want an alternative to the MVC/DAO/DTO structure ...where the community doesnt flame them ?

4. is it something else ?

Because based on docker pulls, java still is probably just as popular as nodejs or something.

what would make java sexy again ?

It's interesting what "popular" can mean. Chances are the "popular" kids in your high school weren't necessarily well liked, they just had social clout.

Where I work now the the "Java" devs code about 80% Kotlin and 20% Java.

At my previous job we were mostly Ruby except for a service that relied on a Java library that connected to some obscure systems that no other language had a library for. Yeah, we used Java, but it was because that was our only option.

> Maven central is MASSIVE with 27 terabytes of jars

I think this is a bad approach. Developer should know his components, and adding one shouldn't be a frequent event.

The post is missing to mention the ecosystem.

"Popular" and "still used a lot" are two very different ideas.

Unfortunately one of the examples used in the article introduces an SQL injection attack vector. Don't build parametrized SQL out of Strings.