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In many ways, it isn't.

You could argue that C is powerful because it tends to produce the fastest running code.

You could argue that Lisp is powerful because it allows high-level abstractions letting you reduce very complex problems to much more manageable chunks.

You could argue that Perl, Ruby or Python is powerful because they let you whip up a simple program in very short time.

Java is the worst of these languages, except C, in terms of abstractions and development time, hampered by a strict type system and very cumbersome reflection (which lets you work around the type system when needed).

Where Java really shines is the combination of

  • it is used a lot, meaning that the language and libraries are reasonably bug free (similar to C, unlike Lisp, Python et.al)
  • it has an enormous number of libraries (only C can compete)
  • it is probably the easiest language to port from one OS to another (ex. from Windows to Mac or Linux)
  • it is reasonably fast (a few percent slower than C or compiled Lisp, but on the order of 10x faster than Perl/Ruby/Python)
  • it is perhaps the easiest language to use for large projects with multiple programmers over long time, due to a convenient name space system (packages), a good documentation tool (Javadoc), the documentation inherent in the type system and good IDE support.
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15y ago

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