Okay, I think I fit the "hacker" name (whatever that is) as well as anyone.
And for my next project, easily the most ambitious I've undertaken, I'm working on the JVM.
If you'd asked me three years ago if I'd ever write Java code, the answer would be no.
I don't really write Java though – I'm mostly using Scala, along with a couple of libraries that were written in Java, that I patch (e.g. Cassandra).
Point is, hackers are choosing the JVM today, whether its Scala, Clojure, Groovy, or JRuby, Jython, and the like. And having Java in the mix, from my perspective, is not at all bad. It means there's tonnes of relatively usable libraries out there, that are easy to tweak without breaking things, that have had plenty of time to bake.
The Java classloader mechanism is kind of nasty when it's paired with application servers, but consider on its own, it's allowing us to do live rollouts of new applications written in Scala without restarting the JVM. (We don't use an application server, we effectively wrote our own.)
Akka is like Erlang-light, and paired with Scala, makes the kinds of things people are wanting to do with Node.js (which I ported to Solaris, along with v8) easier, faster, and safer.
tl;dr Hackers are starting to choose the JVM, and the modern languages built on top of it (Scala, Groovy, Clojure) and the huge base of existing Java libs is making that possible -- just like the huge base of C/C++ libs made choosing Python, Ruby, or Perl reasonable a decade ago.
And for my next project, easily the most ambitious I've undertaken, I'm working on the JVM.
If you'd asked me three years ago if I'd ever write Java code, the answer would be no.
I don't really write Java though – I'm mostly using Scala, along with a couple of libraries that were written in Java, that I patch (e.g. Cassandra).
Point is, hackers are choosing the JVM today, whether its Scala, Clojure, Groovy, or JRuby, Jython, and the like. And having Java in the mix, from my perspective, is not at all bad. It means there's tonnes of relatively usable libraries out there, that are easy to tweak without breaking things, that have had plenty of time to bake.
The Java classloader mechanism is kind of nasty when it's paired with application servers, but consider on its own, it's allowing us to do live rollouts of new applications written in Scala without restarting the JVM. (We don't use an application server, we effectively wrote our own.)
Akka is like Erlang-light, and paired with Scala, makes the kinds of things people are wanting to do with Node.js (which I ported to Solaris, along with v8) easier, faster, and safer.
tl;dr Hackers are starting to choose the JVM, and the modern languages built on top of it (Scala, Groovy, Clojure) and the huge base of existing Java libs is making that possible -- just like the huge base of C/C++ libs made choosing Python, Ruby, or Perl reasonable a decade ago.