Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
Java can be fast at runtime, but optimization is most effective on frequently-run, repetitive sections of code.
The slow Java interpreter spin-up time was a big annoyance for use of Java in serverless cloud functions. Now the big cloud providers have ways to minimize that spin-up delay.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
Java can be fast at runtime, but optimization is most effective on frequently-run, repetitive sections of code.
The slow Java interpreter spin-up time was a big annoyance for use of Java in serverless cloud functions. Now the big cloud providers have ways to minimize that spin-up delay.