none of it informed by a labor rights perspective
all our love to our friends who work in Java, enjoy Java, identify with Java. we don't buy into the idea that people are inherently defined by their choices of tools, but we understand that many people do and that, therefore, discussions of the relative merits of programming languages can be emotionally fraught. we promise this is not an attack on you <3
anyway so we think Java is an early example of a programming language that's trying to be to the craft of programming what factory looms were to the craft of weaving - that is, the end of it, as anything other than a curiosity
its features are aimed at needs that individuals and small groups don't have; it's not meant to be something that programmers whose focus is on creative endeavour form a close relationship with. it's meant to be rigid and formal, and to minimize the room for creative expression with in it, so as to move closer to a world where tech workers can be treated as interchangeable parts
did it succeed at that? no, not really, it's honestly a perfectly good language for a lot of things. but that's not our point. we're not saying that it's somehow an irredeemable language, we're saying that the design intent behind it, the purpose that made it appeal to business users, was about enshrining then-best practices into the language and making it impossible to deviate from them, so as to remove the need for human judgement about how to apply these practices
anyway, the critique of Java back in the day was ... identifying a lot of the same flaws we'd personally point to as examples of that, but lacking an understanding of the unifying intent behind them, of what @NireBryce recently called the "treasure map".
everything we've said just now is of course up for debate, we are trying to start a conversation, not end one. we just find it extremely noteworthy that the discussion today can have labor concepts in it, when back in the 90s it did not.
As long as we have computers we will have languages that turn software into an assembly line, and to some extent I'm not even sure if this is strictly bad. Like other tools of industrialization, they just make things, but don't care for whom. And perhaps you do want to reduce cognitive burden by using them and perhaps your incentives align.
The keyword is sometimes.
