why I shy away from the Java community; pedantry about simple concepts
Agree.
Please note the cultural context. Java, XML, design patterns, and enterprise (CORBA, MQ) all hit about the same time. So there was a temporal grouping for all those things.
I started a design patterns study group about 15+ years ago. (It continues to this day. We've covered many other topics over the years, including SICP, concurrency, HTML5, computational intelligence, etc.)
There was no bigger fan of "design patterns" than me. Now, I think learning "design patterns" are a phase of a developer's maturity. Kind of like only a master jazz musician knows how to break the rules of jazz.
Unfortunately, it's hard to expunge (deprecate) bad ideas. For many, it's simply easier to get a fresh start by adopting a new language, tool stack, community.
Java is a pretty good language. What it needs is a do-over. What would Java look like today, following the original principles of the Oak Team?
Have a look at more modern Java; for example Acteur[1]. Guice and a focus on annotations have dramatically reduced the annoying boilerplate that used to surround EJB. Spring appears to be on the way out, which I think everyone can be thankful for - although the latest versions of Spring are starting to become quite good now, so maybe it will survive.
Plus with the way Android is going, if you want to write something that actually runs on the devices you own, you'll want to know Java. ;)
Agree.
Please note the cultural context. Java, XML, design patterns, and enterprise (CORBA, MQ) all hit about the same time. So there was a temporal grouping for all those things.
I started a design patterns study group about 15+ years ago. (It continues to this day. We've covered many other topics over the years, including SICP, concurrency, HTML5, computational intelligence, etc.)
There was no bigger fan of "design patterns" than me. Now, I think learning "design patterns" are a phase of a developer's maturity. Kind of like only a master jazz musician knows how to break the rules of jazz.
Unfortunately, it's hard to expunge (deprecate) bad ideas. For many, it's simply easier to get a fresh start by adopting a new language, tool stack, community.
Java is a pretty good language. What it needs is a do-over. What would Java look like today, following the original principles of the Oak Team?