It feels like anything is mowed down on the internet. I’ve been a dev for a long time too, and I never feel sure when I chose a stack for a new toy project (in my day job I rarely get to chose, so that’s a non issue there)
As a society and as individual computer scientists, none of us actually know what a computer is or how to use them. All programming languages are guesses, mere attempts to encode our natural-language reasoning and philosophy in the purely syntactic and formal fashion required by computers. Don’t let yourself become biased in favor of specific languages; instead, understand that all languages are bad in different ways.
And don’t forget, that much of what people criticize isn’t the language per se, but the community/ecosystem around it.
NPM is objectively bad, but Javascript is by no means coupled to it.
Java projects are often very “verbose”, but that’s a choice by the developer of the libraries and apps, not so much Java itself.
Ecosystems matter, though. In fact, I think they’re the hardest part to learn for most languages.
You can try to get away from NPM, but you’ll always run across instructions on how to do a thing in NPM. Do it any other way, and you’re on your own.
You can try to write Java in a less verbose way, but the standard library will fight you before we even talk about third party libs.
