Again this is my opinion, and I say this as a very mediocre developer in a past life and having managed many developers, both mediocre and ninja awesome.
I agree that there are some amazing Java devs out there.
Most Java devs are not amazing (and heck most devs aren't amazing). But Java devs are not amazing with a frequency and depth that both boggles the mind and is entirely expected as that's the point of the language -- accommodate mediocre developers in a large shop producing boring enterprise code.
If you look where it's publicly known that Google uses Java, it's pretty much in Ads. The most boring, enterprisy kind of dev job Google has, but it's the money maker so it has to work despite having unmotivated "I'm just here for the paycheck" developers hacking on it.
Yeah, I know, it was used on the backend of Wave, and via GWT for the Wave web client (which was dog slow btw, I loved Wave, but have yet to encounter a web app as slow). And look where that got us.
As an aside, here's an interesting little writeup about why GWT is bad (with bonus example by pg of all people)
And, at least publicly that's about it. If a dev can't be bothered to just learn the syntax of another language in a couple of weeks in order to properly support their target platform, they are a mediocre developer almost by definition.
I agree that there are some amazing Java devs out there.
Most Java devs are not amazing (and heck most devs aren't amazing). But Java devs are not amazing with a frequency and depth that both boggles the mind and is entirely expected as that's the point of the language -- accommodate mediocre developers in a large shop producing boring enterprise code.
If you look where it's publicly known that Google uses Java, it's pretty much in Ads. The most boring, enterprisy kind of dev job Google has, but it's the money maker so it has to work despite having unmotivated "I'm just here for the paycheck" developers hacking on it.
Yeah, I know, it was used on the backend of Wave, and via GWT for the Wave web client (which was dog slow btw, I loved Wave, but have yet to encounter a web app as slow). And look where that got us.
As an aside, here's an interesting little writeup about why GWT is bad (with bonus example by pg of all people)
http://ryandoherty.net/2007/04/29/why-google-web-toolkit-rot...
And, at least publicly that's about it. If a dev can't be bothered to just learn the syntax of another language in a couple of weeks in order to properly support their target platform, they are a mediocre developer almost by definition.