I often feel like everyone on Slashdot is a mix of two people
- Old 50+ year olds used to the good 'ol days when you would write your own stack from scratch whenever writing an application
- 20 year olds fresh out of (or still in) college who yell "squirrel!" at everything new and shiny
The truth is, that 75% - 90% of the business applications that make the world go 'round, and make nearly every startup today go 'round, are based on Java or some complimentary technology like Node.js with Java bindings. The reason for this is simple: The Apache foundation. There are SO MANY amazing enterprise-class Java libraries available via the Apache project that there is little to no reason to ever write your own. The mantra where I work, and it should be where EVERYONE works, is before you write any plumbing code at all, check Apache first. People who roll their own plumbing code INVARIABLY end up with subtle errors they did not think of or subtle problems that will manifest themselves in 2 or 3 year when they try to scale.. and all these problems were likely already figure out long ago.
When building a woodsheed, do you cut down the trees, mill the lumber, and forge the nails? Of course not, you take advantage of modern economies of scale so you can focus on the REAL building project, not the building blocks. The same is true for any halfway competent software developer.. The days of people writing their own libraries for DB MVC, for configuration management, for network access, for parsing libraries, for thread pools.. these days are gone, and thank god. The less you have to worry about the low-level plumbing, the more you can focus on the real business problem. And furthermore, the more people that make use of a low level plumbing libary, the better and more secure and stable it becomes, for everyone.