He told us to use notepad++ but right after he said that its not the best program to write Java. I'm just wondering what the best free and paid program. This is my first class in programming and I just want to start off on the right foot.

Hello, I'm a second-year IT student hoping to become a software engineer. I've been learning java for the past month. I like it, but I'm not sure if it's still the most suitable programming language to focus on if being a software engineer is my goal.

First off, I'm admittedly a Java fanboy, although I did some little programming in PhP, Javascript, and Python, and looked at a bunch of others, I really cannot see languages the way I do Java. From the syntax, to the libraries, I love every little thing about this language, that I tell my friends things like: "Programmers want to write programs, I want to write Java programs" and "If it can't be written in Java, it's probably not worth writing". My ears are deaf to all the debate about: "oh you have to be flexible, and know x and y".
But then ever since I started reading, I've been hit with Oracle's reputation.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I think Java's (slight) fall from grace, played out:

1. Java reigned supreme in the browser, esp, after the dust of the dot com bubble settled.

2. Someone found a vulnerability (or two?) in applets (around 2009?) that affected the ton of sites that ran Java.

3. Google, which had been pushing hard to become from a search engine, a browser, disabled Java by default in Chrome...and you know, given the "power of default", programmers pivoted to Javascript, because it was disruptive to have average people download an updated Java + enable it.

4. Oracle, being as litigious as ever, wanted to get back at Google, by removing some internal code Android required from Java, making support for Java 9 not possible (although Java 9+ can be used, with some features not being available).

5. Oracle then sued Google claiming they should've paid them for using Java in Android.

6. Google won the case, and pushed Kotlin and Flutter as the primary means of writing Android programs.

Now, resources; books, tutorials, never use Java for Android programming, and other languages developed frameworks, servers, etc. that ate (a chunk of) Java's lunch.

After most major/seminal books in the field used to use Java for example codes, newer books and editions of said books switched to different languages. (e.g. Martin Fowler's Refactoring comes to mind: Java -> Javascript).

Between 2000, and 2010, authors of major libraries:

- Kent Beck, author of xUnit (originally in SmallTalk).
- Doug Cutting, author of Lucene, which gave birth to elastic search, and inspired other IR libraries...plus pretty much all of Apache Software, were automatically either written in or translated to Java.

Meanwhile now, while efforts of developers of the JDK, and the countless major Java frameworks, can't be dismissed by any means, the community just sounds ...quiet. Even here, Java-related sub-reddits are pretty inactive compared to dotnet/python subreddits.

So, senior devs of the early 2000s, curious to know what your thoughts on Java's journey so far, and possibly its future?