You can't ignore the fact that literally studying coding at this point is so demoralizing and you don't need really to study much if you think about it. You only need to be able to read the code to understand if it generated correctly etc but when if you don't understand some framework you just ask it to explain it to you etc. Basically gives vibes of a skill not being used anymore that much by us programmers. But will shift in more prompting and verifying and testing
I completed the book Programming Principles and Practice using C++ (which I HIGHLY recommend to any beginner interested in software engineering) about year ago with GPT4 as a companion. I read the book throughly and did all the exercises, only asking questions to GPT4 when I was stuck. This took me about 900-1000 hours total. Although I achieved my goal of learning C++ to a basic novice level, I acquired another skill unintentionally: the ability to break down tasks effectively to LLMs and prompt in a fashion that is extremely modular. I've been able to create complex apps and programs in a variety of programming languages even though I really only know C++. It has been an eye-opening experience. Of course it isn't perfect, but it is mind blowing and quite disturbing.
Spring Boot is indeed quite usable! I'd compare it to something like modern ASP.NET, good runtime performance, okay ecosystem, good tooling, okay languages.
The old Spring, not so much - I've never had a bare Spring project that was pleasant to work with, especially when you don't have embedded Tomcat and the application server is configured separately from the deployable .war or whatever, what a mess. Thankfully, you can put those legacy projects into containers and make things slightly more palatable.
That said, even Spring Boot can feel a bit much sometimes, something like Dropwizard is still very idiomatic as far as the Java ecosystem is concerned and is both stable and usable in those cases: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/stable/ (not as fancy as Vert.X or Quarkus or whatever, but it's been around for a while and is decently documented)
ASP.NET Core + ecosystem of packages for it are likely more comparable to Active-J and Vert.X in terms of focus on reducing boilerplate and offering good performance. There are more similarities in the API esp. with minimal API within the former. It is a much more focused package and Spring Boot performance really isn't up to par vs all these.
Yeah, I’ve done Spring stuff for the last 16 years, going from XML config (which, frankly, was nice in that there was a central place to see the structure of the app) to the more modern Java/annotation/magic-based config. I find it very intuitive and straightforward to set up, Spring Data is damn near magical and at one point, the app that I joked about (three lines of Java, 20 lines of annotations) became reality for a program that was populating RabbitMQ from change data written to a DB2 table.
Maybe it’s because my programming days date back to the era of 7-bit ASCII and every language implementation was a little different from the others in what aspects and extensions of the language it provided, but I find Java/Spring a pretty comfortable place to work (which is not to say that I eschew other languages). In general, I find that most of the time when developers express hate for a language or platform it really boils down to: “this isn’t what I’m used to and I don‘t want to change.”
