[FriendlyMike]

I've been a Java developer for twenty years. I've used it for everything front front end to distributed systems. I've built gradle plug-ins and clips with JAVA. I have every shortcut in intellij memorized.

Even with all this it takes me substantially less time to get go, python, or ts working as a cli. Java cli is a solution looking for a problem

[mbreese]

I’m about the same. I’ve had one Java project going for over 10 years. It’s a collection of utilities that I use for work everyday that has grown substantially over the years. It is a CLI program that runs in my Mac, Linux servers and Linux HPC clusters. It is built with a fat-JAR concatenated to a shell stub in front that makes it effectively a single-file install. I also wrote a complete library for defining CLI programs. It is pretty easy to use, but it relies on reflection and annotations, so Graal has been difficult to get working (or was the last time I tried).

All of that to say, I’m also familiar with the problem.

For the past 3-4 years I’ve reached more for Go to my new CLI projects. Small differences in installed Java versions across clusters can be a problem, but for me the biggest issue is dealing with JVM arguments. I writing code for working with genomics data files. Sometimes these are large, and sometimes they are small. And I hate having to tell both my job scheduler (SLURM mainly these days) and the JVM how much memory to use.

This isn’t a problem in Go. So, that’s the language I gravitate to these days.

[megadopechos]

> Java cli is a solution looking for a problem

That's a great way of putting it. I'm a Java developer also; I'm most comfortable with Java and, dare I say, I like Java. But Java would be far down the list of tools I'd use to make a CL program.

[maxandersen]

I felt and did the same as you - until I made jbang as I was tired of seeing kotlin script being included to just write java...

Then when I had ability to write java scripts with dependencies, we added auto download of JDK and then made it so could run any jar (not just scripts) and I suddenly now have full debug support for anything I do + I can install and run this on any docker container or laptop - even my parents or a library computer running some ancient windows. Try that with npm and python :)

All I'm saying - I hear you and I grok why. What I'm saying that for at least close to 5 years at least last 3.5 years there been a way to use the jvm as easy and more reliable than python/nodescript/typescript....run cli's, swing/jfx, backend apps etc.

And in 2026 I want to make java TUI's a reality.

[Scubabear68]

Same here. Was using Java in the alpha/beta/gamma days. Have built a lot with it. Would not use it for command line tooling by default, only if it happened to be the simplest option (like maybe a library or something does nearly everything needed).