Comment by PhiGuy on "As a student should I learn Java and PHP?"

CommentAs a student should I learn Java and PHP?

PhiGuy

Developer and Crypto Enthusiast

Aug 30, 2018

Java may serve you well to learn because it is a widely used, highly understood language. It will teach you the basics of Object Oriented Programming. More than Java, I think learning general programming concepts is of higher importance. You can transfer the skills you learn in one language to other languages more easily.

Pick a core language to learn, and learn it really well. This will allow you to think in that language and transfer your skills to other languages more easily.

To answer your questions.

You will survive just fine without knowing oracle stuff
Java is rarely used in web dev. PHP is used more, but not by me and any of the projects I've worked on. Wordpress uses PHP a lot.

JavaScript and Python are my two goto languages. I love them, they're easy to use, versatile and will grant you all the power you will need to be a killer dev.

Mark

Aug 30, 2018

There's some Java in backend development, but it's not something I'd recommend.

Sebastian

Aug 30, 2018

@mverleg What are your issues with a Java based backend?

I have a Java/Kotlin based backed by default (Spring Boot)

I guess the only web-specific part is that a substantial part of java backends still use JSPs and handlers that maintain a lot of state in memory between requests. But you can write modern code, of course. I don't see anything that really helps, but it's surely possible. The interfaces with SQL and Javascript are now more possible to do type-safely with annotations, but other languages are better at it (and at type safety in general).

Kotlin has the nice bonus that you can share types between the backend (JVM) and the frontend (compile to JS) to make that interface type-safe. Do you have experience with that?

Do you see some things that really give it an advantage, rather than just make it acceptable? For me, it's at least more type-safe than all the popular options (though less than it could be).

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