Ironically the Java ecosystem could stand to use some garbage collection of its own: there's a ton of old, outdated info out there that both colors people's impressions of the language and teaches new players a whole manner of bad habits. I appreciate what this article's going for and hope there'll be follow-ups.
I use Java daily and though there's undoubtedly room for improvement (I'm looking forward to when tooling better supports stuff added in Java 8), I think a lot of the negativity that surrounds it is undeserved. There's definitely bloated XML-infested frameworks out there but the core's a real workhorse.
It's not just the JDK that needs pruning, though. It's the ecosystem of third party libraries, and the millions of pages on blogs and StackOverflow (and shudder JavaRanch) that contain bad, outdated advice, following which will make people hate Java.
I'd love it if the JDK had a "learner mode" that disabled interned string literals. Then newbies experimenting with `assert(str1 == str2)` wouldn't leap to false conclusions.
== should never have been used for that method, which is very rarely what you want. The right thing is probably to deprecate == on nonprimitive types, replacing it with a longer name that's clearer about what it means.
I use Java daily and though there's undoubtedly room for improvement (I'm looking forward to when tooling better supports stuff added in Java 8), I think a lot of the negativity that surrounds it is undeserved. There's definitely bloated XML-infested frameworks out there but the core's a real workhorse.