I dislike developing in Java. I am not a fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. That being said, someone who takes the time to understand how the JVM works and how to configure their processes with a proper operator's mindset can do amazing things in terms of resource usage.
It's easy to poke at Java for being a hog when in reality its just poor coding and operating practices that lead to bloated runtime behavior.
For a long time I wondered if it was a failing of the language or the culture.
After spending 4 days trying to diagnose a problem with hbase given the two errors "No region found" and "No table provided" and finally figuring out it was due to a version mismatch I now believe it is the culture.
At the very least you should be printing a WARN when you connect to an incompatible version.
Actually configuring sendmail is a piececake these days thanks to Google and countless engineers documenting in excruciating detail the problems they faced.
Bad logging is not endemic to the Java development mindset... in fact I'd give Java the nod for the _option_ to generate tremendously large quantities of log data when requested, above almost any other platform, excepting maybe Windows if you figure out how to turn on ETL.
If you want bad logging, look at most PHP projects...
For really thoughtful logging, the Apache HTTP client and HikariCP are good Java examples.
So much this. Back in 2001 I used IntelliJ IDEA on a PC with 128MB of RAM. It worked perfectly, and it was the first IDE I used that checked my code while I was writing it. The much less evolved JBuilder on the other hand stopped every couple seconds for garbage collection.
Both were written in Java.
And don't get me started on Forte (developed by Sun itself, no less). It was even slower and more memory-hungry than JBuilder.
I love Java. We shifted from c++ a year after it arrived on the scene. Since then, I've never needed to learn a new language in any depth. To me, that's a good thing and shows the longevity of the language.
It's easy to poke at Java for being a hog when in reality its just poor coding and operating practices that lead to bloated runtime behavior.