Jira does, somehow, faintly smell of Java. There's just something about how slow it is, and how maximalist it is in supporting every whimsical idea that any rich corporate customer has ever asked of them. No matter how poorly the request blended with everything else Jira does.

Mind you, I've only ever used Jira when its been setup, poorly, to fit in to a badly designed "scrum" process. People say it can be usable if you turn most of its features off. But the same is true of "smart" appliances, and that doesn't make me want to buy any of them.

jira's slow because it's a badly written piece of crap

requiring 20mb of data transfer for each page load isn't java's fault

Every company I worked for eventually used Jira, and it's always set up poorly to half-support a badly designed process. At this point that's just a regular Jira installation, I guess.

Java isn't slow, quite the opposite in fact.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Don’t worry, enterprise Java programming patters will fix that “performance” thing right up. Call a function? Goodness no, not without an helper class being instantiated first. Oh you wanted to instantiate a helper class? Better call a factory to do that. Not directly - have you heard of Dependency Injection? We configure that via XML here.

See? Fast performance isn’t a problem any more. You can make it go away in the time it takes you to load Jira.

JVM startup time is how it got that reputation, I'm guessing benchmarks tend to exclude that.

Back in the early/mid 2000s, Java-based applications often had a Java splashscreen as it loaded, so even non-technical people made the association.

Java is not slow.

Indeed. We moved off of JIRA years ago, but not that many years ago that this isn't still funny every time I think of it:

    veidr 2016-08-22
    Haha, JIRA is very "enterprisey":
    > Unable to find source-code formatter 
    > for language: python. Available 
    > languages are: actionscript, html, 
    > java, javascript, none, sql, xhtml, xml

That's me commenting, but I can find it easily whenever I want just by searching my company's chat for "XHTML".

We were using their hosted service, and it was a dumpster fire inside a meth lab...

(I did have a fine experience with JIRA before, though I want to say it was 20+ years ago (?) but my takeaway was that you needed a full-time JIRA admin person (and of course back then "on-premises" wasn't a thing, because it was the only thing...))

Yup, Jira is indeed very hatable before knowing its implementation details.

I don't know if it's a strong argument for Java however, saying that god-awful software written in it is universally despised, but for reasons other than the language choice.

Saying that a software is god awful when it's commercially successful is not a good argument. Certainly tons of people and orgs out there are deriving value out of it. I still have to see anything that comes closer to Confluence for arranging organisational knowledge

Do you imply a positive correlation between quality and commercial success? I don't think I can name many instances of this, really.

E.g. by far the most commercially successful video games are the bottom-of-the-barrel casinos for kids.

I am implying that there's evidence that more people like it and are willing to pay for it than people not finding it upto the mark. Yes, that's the definition of a successful software.

How would you explain SharePoint if this followed?

Oh, how I hate our management for forcing SharePoint on us.

Software success seems to be 90% about advertising and finding innovative ways to destroy your competition. Microsoft are the masters of that approach.