I'm already burnt out

[housecat]

However, this isn't 1999 anymore and Java is plain old and annoying

If you think Java is old and annoying, try coding in Cobol. They are still teaching Cobol in college in some areas because a lot of government and some businesses still run on Cobol.

In 2020, there was a lot of demand for Cobol programmers because of all the new changes due to coof legislation.

I personally have a love/hate relationship with Cobol.

Yep I have programmed Fortran and COBOL, not a ton, but the jobs I did paid quite well. Yeah I agree syntactically "oooof + aight fine for the money" on both are my feelings. Ada is also of interest. But the ecosystem for Java EE is really sprawling and huge. Syntactically, with Java, I'm like "meh not bad" level, but OMFG when there's an error and it decides to not show the line number or just be strangley obtuse, and it's someone else's code to boot, oh my gaaaaaaaawd. Come to think of it, I'm not sure any other language even my blessed C# has such a big eco-system. Perhaps it could be argued if you cobble together a bunch of C++ then it could compete with size of eco-system, but I mean the more or less blessed-by-Oracle eco-system of Java. So it has a lot of value to learn, just gotta keep your head in the game when doing it. It also makes Android development "slightly" easier but that is a prime-steak all on it's own without mentioning Java.

Oh side note, fireship (100 Seconds of Code) on YouTube has sold me on Expo, finally a proper looking framework for iOS+Android+Webapp launching. Android+iOS dev without owning a mac AND using VSCode. Boss-level stuff here, no more Android Studio or wretched XCode!

I think new programmers are better served going for C and C++ with a side serving of SQL these days then they can pick up basically any other language and be like ah okay it's doing this or that, easy-peasy, an excellent base. It's also good for them to "see" how people think about assembler and why C/C++ are excellent languages. Oh! C++ allows the bridge to IBM/AS400 programming and wooooooooooow money money money it's raining serious money for those jobs