Mostly agreed that Java, warts and all, has gotten better, and will stick around. It's the new COBOL, for better or worse. (I still wouldn't want to use it voluntarily, but if someone pays me enough money, sure.)
However:
> Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP.
The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Financial transactions dwarf GDP by so much that even a bit player of a technology will facilitate more transactions than global GDP.
(And that's fine. Many of these transactions are offsetting, and that it's a sign of an efficient market that the mispricings are so small that participants needs giant gross flows to profit from them.
Somewhat related: a single high capacity fire hose (at about 75kg of water per second) moves about the same number of electrons as you'd need to power the total US electricity consumption at 120V. Obviously, your fire hose also sprays plenty of pesky protons which completely offset the electrical current from the electrons.)
> The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly.
Agreed. I guess its comparing production capacity to distribution capacity. Distribution capacity will equal n_tx * tx_amt. Having said that, another metric to look at is how much of software infrastructure is built on Java. Simply adding AWS to this equation proves the value added by Java backed systems. Hard to say that about any other langauge. Also we can look at versatility, Java is used to write very large data processing systems, CDN networks, API servers and even widely used consumer apps (IntelliJ products). Its very hard to find any other language that has had an outsized impact across domains. Of course the counter being Linux written on C powers all of the internet. True but C doesnt have the cross domain impact that Java has had.
So I disagree with the assessment that Java is a terrible langauge performance or productivity wise or it wouldnt have had this impact.
However:
> Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP.
The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Financial transactions dwarf GDP by so much that even a bit player of a technology will facilitate more transactions than global GDP.
(And that's fine. Many of these transactions are offsetting, and that it's a sign of an efficient market that the mispricings are so small that participants needs giant gross flows to profit from them.
Somewhat related: a single high capacity fire hose (at about 75kg of water per second) moves about the same number of electrons as you'd need to power the total US electricity consumption at 120V. Obviously, your fire hose also sprays plenty of pesky protons which completely offset the electrical current from the electrons.)