Just curious what kind of work are you in to consider Java as a great choice?. Anything Web related because Java seems like an overkill to do Web development with.
I find Java to be perfectly reasonable (if not great) for some classes of web based applications. I mean, I wouldn't use Java for a generic company website that was mostly static HTML with no interactivity. But for a web based application that requires talking to databases, pushing messages onto a message queue, consuming web services, etc., I like it. Note that I'm not saying it's perfect, but that's half the point of what I was saying above. A language doesn't need to be perfect, it just has to be "good enough" AND meet a few other pragmatic criteria: availability of libraries, documentation, compilation speed, whatever it might be.
That said, Java also strikes me as a good choice for things like text mining, machine learning, data mining, etc. It also fits well where there's an emphasis on integrations with other systems, but that is, again, partly down to the availability of libraries. And just based on it's popularity for such applications, I think it's safe to say that many people find Java a good fit for building things like database engines, message queueing servers, etc.
Is good to for once hear some positive things about Java on here. I'm getting into Web development mainly and I've been learning Java and PHP of and on for the past year. Is it possible to learn both at the same time? or is better to stick to one and learn it for Web development. I like both Java and PHP. I think Java looks better though and I use both eclipse and IntelliJ.
Is it possible to learn both at the same time?
Hard to say. My guess is that it depends on the individual. I'd probably try to master one thing at least reasonably well, then move onto something else. But that's just me.
That said, there are fair criticisms of both Java and PHP, and hackers can sometimes run towards being obsessive over details and over analytical. So the extent to which Java is verbose because of the required boilerplate for, say, getters and setters, offends the aesthetic sense a lot of people have. Likewise, Java is seen as "less powerful" because it lacks some features (multiple inheritance, etc.)
My take on Java is this: I don't like the language per-se as much as I like, say, C++. But in pragmatic terms I can get a shit-ton more usable work done in Java, because it had binary compatibility for libraries from day 1, which meant that creating and distributing libraries in Java is dead simple, which led to an ecosystem where Java has libraries for damn near everything. And the JVM is nearly ubiquitous, running on almost every platform known to man. And since I learned Java back when it was still fairly new, it just happens that I already know it, it does most everything I need, and has libraries for everything under the sun and then some. Pragmatically speaking, it's a great choice, at least for the kinds of problems I tend to find myself working on.
Of course, the great thing is, no one is limited to just one language. I can fall back to C, C++ or Python if needed... and I actually do most of my coding in Groovy these days - but I consider Groovy to just be "a better Java". All of that said, I have an ambition to dive deeper into a number of other languages (Erlang, Haskell, Go, Scala, Clojure, R among others) but just rarely have time to go off and spend time with that stuff. That's the downside to having a dayjob and a startup I guess... time to do purely exploratory, "fun" stuff is a little limited.
why do hackers seem to hate the most popular languages?
I'd argue that most don't, and that you're hearing from a vocal minority. The people who find Java, PHP, COBOL, whatever perfectly usable, don't have a reason to voice it to the world. They just quietly sit back and do what they're doing. But the people with an axe to grind are the ones writing blog posts, posting long rants on forums, etc., etc.