I did read the rest, but I'm stuck on the first part where their SQL table has almost a thousand cols. Why so many?

The Java "compiled" code isn't a native binary like in Go, it really does run in a VM. I honestly don't know if that's why they handle memory differently though.

Any company that's 10 years old will have code that's 10 years old in every language they use. And every language has some flaw that was "fixed recently" but that's not relevant in a mature codebase. Like "Python packaging is fixed now with uv" no it's not. And especially anything to do with threading vs cooperative multitasking will stick around.

Mostly old code will keep working, but there are exceptions like Python 2->3 breakage that deserves all the criticism it got.

Records and pattern-matching didn't exist back then and are only used in new codebases. That isn't enough to fix it anyway.

The Go error handling is bad enough that it makes the lang not a top choice for me. Seems like entire vision of Go was being the opposite of C++ in every way, and that resulted in something halfway decent, but it unfortunately doesn't use exceptions. You get stuff done in fewer loc than in Java at least, and it always had solid m:n greenthreading, and the GC just works without having to tune it.

Most of the young people like me learned Java as a first language in AP Computer Science, then probably again in college. We were tested thoroughly on all the OOP details and required to use that in projects. The most popular video game is/was also in Java, and people love to mod it.

But still nobody wants to use it given the choice, because it sucks. 75% of the code you write is boilerplate mainly thanks to OOP, the com.foo.bar stuff is an eyesore, and it somehow uses even more RAM than Python. That's without getting into the enterprise cruft land where each method has 3 annotations on it, where the annotations themselves are maintained by an entire outsourced team.