this should be like, pinned, to the top of HN
IT Runs on Java 8
51–60 of 556 posts
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#52Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#53At work, we have some customers who want to use WebLogic and Websphere, and last time I checked those don't have versions that support anything beyond Java 8. I still use Java 8 even on personal projects. I'm migrating those to Kotlin, so I'm at least not held back with regard to programming language features. I could upgrade those to Java 11 (or 12), just haven't prioritized taking the time to do that over other tas…
I disagree. Addition of generics in Java 5 was bigger.
I'd rather keep lambdas and live with runtime polymorphism, than keep parametric polymorphism and lose lambdas.
Generics, in terms of scope, is a bigger feature, for sure. And generics make lambdas more usable. But the distance between generics and their alternative - manual casts throughout - is larger than the distance between lambdas and anonymous inner classes.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#54Maybe it's wrong to see startup tech as the cutting edge part of the IT. IT maybe just another industry similar to bio or agriculture and not part of the startup tech. Maybe IT crowd should simply avoid sharing common forums like HN with startup and SV people.
I hope not! HN is for everybody who is intellectually curious.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#55Is the story about Tesla's infrastructure true? I seem to remember it was posted before, and the consensus then was that it was a great work of fiction.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#56HN is basically Reddit for tech founders, so it tends to skew toward hype. And it's a small place, which makes for great echo chambers. Anything that makes it to the front page without being killed by admins, bots or users will probably be over-hyped.
Wrt over-using new tech: I've mostly seen this with hype directed at C-levels. Maybe one or two people on a team will pick up Rust or Go because they saw it on HN, but a year-plus slog will be initiated to implement a single Kubernetes platform that everyone must use, because a jagoff in a suit read a Wired article that said Kubernetes is the future of the internets. (Meanwhile, most of the devs don't use containers, pipelines are stood up in one-off Jenkins on shitty infra, the new "microservices" are really "distributed monoliths", and the security team is a guy nobody knows whose main occupation is writing drafts of best practices that nobody reads)
I think this will continue as long as we build tech by winging it, rather than doing case studies, analyzing solutions, and setting industry standards. And I'd argue another problem is cobbling together our own tools rather than paying for well-made ones. Because we're so interested in either getting things for free or writing them ourselves, really solid tools are rare.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#57Dunno what hole she is in but Excel, Sharepoint are all things that new age companies don't work on & rather is the tool of choice for all things by legacy ones still chugging along.
You may be very surprised how much very serious stuff runs in and is still being written on top of Excel. Trading models dealing with tens of millions of dollars a day for example.
Also key components in calculations that a major investment banker would use to compute numbers for a major deal.
The list is very long.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#58HN might be pointing the way to the future. Or it might be overly focused on things that will never take the world by storm.
HN is a bit of an echo chamber. A very interesting and worthwhile echo chamber, but an echo chamber nevertheless. This is not a criticism, but probably an unavoidable by-product of how it works and the audience it attracts.
It is also just plain old human nature.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#59I mean, Java 8, that's great! From an enterprise point of view it was released basically yesterday. I'm sure a large minority of systems still runs on Java 5 or 6.
I work with Java 7
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#60Incremental improvements to an infrastructure or rather the software ecosystem of a company isn't something many people talk about, indeed. Shiny new tools are interesting and flashy to look at.
For example, I'm very happy with the development of the company I work for over the last 2 or 3 years. I've pushed them from old unmanaged systems to mutable systems managed through chef. There's still some really ugly things, it's mutable, it's not shiny, it's VMs running tomcat running java 8. I like to call it really 2000s and/or vintage. It took time to migrate all systems, to gain trust of stake holders, to educate and convince the ops team. And I guess in some cases, we're running a really ugly mess of a system, but it's a reproducible mess.
But this was a massive improvement and value gain for the company. Suddenly we have an ops team with a lot of leverage and competence to manage an ever growing SaaS setup. And overall, the mindset of most people involved has changed over time towards standards, automation and the value of this. Automation has improved the cost efficiency of some default projects dramatically. We're still old school overall, but we're generating value.
And now the wheel of time has turned some. We've been bought, now there's 8 more development teams, now there's new products being brought in. At this point we're picking up containers at a larger scale because we have to move faster than the config management can handle with the current manpower. So now we're handling some stuff we can using the config management, some stuff with containers.
Overall, moving slow and deliberately in an infrastructure is a very valuable skill. Solve the important problems. Sometimes a trusty, ugly, old java application server isn't your important problem.