Actually, i like it for basic desktop apps, because it just works, and i stay clear of the last 12 years of front-end dumpster fires, where nothing that is over 18 months old, can build, compile or get support anymore. In my day job, I inherit "fun" tasks as 'get this thing someone glued together with webpack4 and frontend-du-jour to work with webpack5 in 2022. Java thank you, any day of the week.

There are a lot of problems in the JS and Swift communities, as there are for Java.

I think you’ve got to meet your customer where they are, and if you can ship Java desktop apps, and they’re happy… keep going.

But you’re not shipping apps to their iPhones using Java. It’s either JS or Swift.

And, on Android it’s JS or Kotlin.

So the common target is JS.

Or Kotlin Multiplatform, which generates .frameworks/cocoapods/spm files that you can use, and all you have to do is write your UI layer in Swift.

You can ship to iOS with Java actually. That's the business model of Gluon:

https://gluonhq.com/

It's a combination of JavaFX, a custom controls library that implements Material Design and GraalVM native image. Whether you want a non-native UI toolkit on iOS is a separate matter, but it can be done technically.

In fact, you can ship JavaFX apps to the web too. It doesn't compile to megabytes of JS either - instead, the JavaFX app runs on the server and the UI is projected to divs and SVG elements on the fly. The browser provides native scrolling and text selection. If you have low latency to the server (e.g. same continent) it can work remarkably well. Check out https://www.jpro.one/ - the entire website is a JavaFX app.

I feel like those crying cargo-cult or enterprise never stopped to look at the alternatives they use. Like Django or Rails. It's in many ways worse than java when it comes to conventions, abstractions doing magic, and weird rules for structuring code.

i've got tons of open source packages on my github with interpreted languages :p

But yeah, I guess i first started using Django ~2008 if I recall correctly, and switched over to Pyramid in 2010. Since then, I've used many other frameworks – in Python, Ruby, JS, C#, Java, and Go. Regardless of the language, I always try and go closer to the metal when I can.

I think your assessment about the others being potentially worse is fair: they're all bad in their own ways. I think it just takes time (and experience across many different teams) to develop good taste.