Someone not having an emotional reaction would not use expressions like "All the worst and most time-consuming troubleshooting experiences of my life have involved Java" and "the JVM decided to vomit all over my screen".

See sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24899595

"All the worst and most time-consuming troubleshooting experiences of my life have involved Java" is simply a statement.

All the worst and most time-consuming troubleshooting experiences of my life have involved dealing with a legacy VB6 app with a truly terrible MSSQL database structure - that's not an emotional statement, it's a fact.

> All the worst and most time-consuming troubleshooting experiences of my life have involved dealing with a legacy VB6 app with a truly terrible MSSQL database structure

Do you feel any powerful emotion when you think about that experience? Would you be indifferent if you would need to do it again?

Yes, dread. But it doesn't make the statement any less true. Myself and every single person maintaining that system felt exactly the same - it was a complete mess.

> it was a complete mess

I'm not doubting that at all. Was it VB6's fault or MSSQL's?

It was the owner of the platform & its developers, neither technology - I think we both understand that.

I was just trying to make the point that it's not necessarily emotional for someone to not want to work with a certain tool without an expert available because of terrible past experiences where that was the case.

I'd say it's almost impossible to imagine any past event someone has present at without having some emotional response.

The emotional raction is the resistance to Java and the assumption that it will break and you will need a Java expert to fix it. I don't know much C and I use MySQL and don't need to worry about C internals at all when using it. Just some configuration stuff, and maybe install some C build tools. I wouldn't expect it to be much different for this project.

I think you've overlooked OPs point a bit. You don't need to understand the C/libc internals to be able to operate MySQL (you do need to know it's quirks though). With a JVM application, you're going to need to understand the application level configs, think of something like spark, and if you're doing anything with large amounts of data or high RPS, you're also going to need to understand the JVM internals. The closest analog might be needing to understand the libc allocator for certain usage patterns, and that happens, but it's far more rare than someone needing to tune garbage collection algorithms and parameters. JVM tuning is just a reality of operating in the java ecosystem.