By Tristan Olynick, Staff Writer
As someone who has done extensive research into Java, and worked on back-end server plug-in development with it, I would like to state that Java is slow and finicky.
I’ve worked with programming languages such as Python and C++ before, creating multiple bots for platforms like Instagram and Twitter. To do this, I have had to interact with this god forsaken language (which also includes JavaScript or as I will refer to it for now on, JS) and it’s corresponding JSON files. Every time I’ve used it, something has gone wrong.
The only positive thing I am able to say about JS is that when you aren’t getting a constant flow of errors (approximately 3% of the time) it’s actually fun to write in. In addition to this, because Java is not a compiled or interpreted language, it’s completely platform-independent. This allows Java to run on phones, computers, servers, and more without any extra code or languages.
A massive negative point about JS is how abominably slow it is. According to Forbes, when accurately translated to Java, optimized C++ code runs 3x slower. Compared to C++, Java is a high level language; it doesn’t have access to lower level functionality like C++, making it way more inefficient. Along with bound checks on arrays, and higher memory usage, Java is generally considered to be an unproductive language.
If being slow wasn’t bad enough, even Java’s libraries are flawed. Log4J is an open-source, apache logging framework that many developers use to store logging information. On December 1, 2021 CloudFlare (a widely used cybersecurity plug-in/company) reported that an exploit in Log4J allowed remote code execution on other people’s computers. Essentially, if you exploited this bug, someone could anonymously run code on your computer or server (which is really bad). Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks can lead to your system being accessed remotely, key logged, and even bricked.
My final problem with JavaScript is its readability. Because it is a single-threaded, asynchronous, language, it is hard to read and learn. When using someone else’s code, you want to be able to understand what you’re working with.
As a scripting language that is very slow with zero readability, I believe that Java is a bad language. Despite all of this, JS is used frequently, which is unfortunate because it makes it an important language to learn.