No Stupid Questions (Developer Edition)

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Would it benefit my software dev job in the future if I learned Java? (self.no_stupid_questions)

submitted 1 year ago by Dazawassa to c/no_stupid_questions

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Because I'm in my very early 20s I missed out on the huge Java craze. Everything was Python when I started getting a more formal education and before then all my work was in C++. Knowing more languages would obviously look better on a CV but I mean if I would benefit in a practical sense? I have two friends who are long time Java devs. And recently another friend who generally works with legacy C++ based systems from the early 2000s late 90s period had to work on a bunch of stuff in Java. Java is clearly still in large scale use among older systems. So would it be likely that eventually I would need to work on Java systems myself when my job is mostly JavaScript currently?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (7 children)

If you go down the Java route you will probably end up working with enterprise/legacy software. If you are fine with that, do it. But what's wrong with focussing on JavaScript as your main language?

[–] Dazawassa 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Sorry if I worded it strange. What I meant was that I'm going down the JavaScript path. But that doesn't mean I'll only ever do JS. I've already had to work with some PHP and Ruby. So would Java also be likely to come up eventually?

[–] l4sgc 2 points 1 year ago

I'm a full-stack web developer. I mainly focus on frontend TypeScript/Angular at the moment, but we still support older products made with JavaScript/AngularJS. Across different projects I have had backends using php, Python/Django, Java/JSP, C#/asp.net, JavaScript/Express. Some languages have features or frameworks that make them easier for certain use cases, but sometimes I don't have any choice and one type of server is required to interface with external code or applications.

I don't know how likely it is that you will encounter a situation where Java is required, but that situation did arise for me and I am still forced to use it to support one of our products. If I had a choice though I would always pick C# over Java, since C# is pretty similar, but in my opinion every change is an improvement, and I feel like it has a lot of extra features.

Your preferences might be different though so I agree with the other sentiment that you should give everything a try, and see which languages/frameworks appeal to you and you want to learn more about.

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