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Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

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101–110 of 286 posts

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#101

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

In my opinion, Java as a web language is good when you don't need to really understand what's happening (like in low-traffic situations). If concurrency isn't an issue, then the massive amount of libraries can help you a lot. In high-traffic environments, that ignorance punishes you. I've always felt Java and the JVM are of the mindset that you need a Ph.D. to even understand how it works or how to configure it, and…

>In my opinion, Java as a web language is good when you don't need to really understand what's happening (like in low-traffic situations)

Huh? Java is used in huge traffic backends, including HFT with minimal latencies acceptable all the way to Google and Twitter scale.

If anything, Java is much more fast and low level than the typical languages used for huge high-traffic services -- Rails, Python, etc - never mind about what's used in "low-traffic situations".

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#102
post #40
post #24

Unrelated to the real topic at hand: I find telling that an antiquated software company is choosing to publish stuff as PDF. I usually refuse to open such links - my personal choice of course - because I can't see any valid reason to use it in this context. Yeah PDF for printed forms, but anything else makes no sense to me, yet it's way more used that I could imagine.

PDFs are a great file format for digitally viewing print-style publications. This document appears to be in the style of a print publication, not a web page. Here's an example of two far less antiquated technology companies using a PDF for something that could also have been a web page, but was found to make more sense as a print-style publication: https://blog.google/documents/73/Exposure_Notification_-_FAQ...

Of course it is for printing, yet we are viewing it on the web. Is anybody actually printing any of those announcements? Or is the thought that a "printing look" would confer a document more weight in the eyes of some consumers?

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#103
While my career has mostly been as an AI practitioner, Java was also very good for my career. Sun had a link for a year on their Java home page to a blog article I wrote on the Java world tour so for about 10 years I was the first search hit for “Java consultant” which was nice enough.

Except for periodically updating my Java AI book [1] (5th edition was released July 2020), I don’t much use Java because most of my customers want to use a Lisp language.

Where should Java go now? I think both OpenJDK and also Oracle are doing a good job adding new features. I would vote for faster startup time; keep improving language conciseness; better data initialization literals.

[1] https://leanpub.com/javaai

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#104

Top point talks about targeting data scientists. It would be interesting seeing what that means in their mind. Based on the current state of affairs oracle and the jvm seem very far away from mainstream ML

I too would like to know what's going on in their mind. Given they're apparently under the impression there that the most notable contender in that space is Go. Scala isn't a bad call though, and is JVM. Java itself seems like a non-starter for doing actual data science due to its verbosity and lack of scripting.

Instead, Julia should really be first to mind when considering that question. Although I might expect the author to respond with something about the mysteries of 'production'.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, while Java was the original "write once, run anywhere" language, it never succeeded in that regard (e.g. browser applets were never popular). Ironically, I believe Javascript has. I was pretty much exclusively a Java programmer for the first decade and a half of my career, before moving to Node and TypeScript. I don't think I could ever go back at the point. Most importantly, this is my first time where t…

> Ironically, while Java was the original "write once, run anywhere" language, it never succeeded in that regard That's what people say, but I don't see that. The same Java code is extremely portable, from Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc, on both the server, cli, and GUI app side. It's just that its UI libs have historically been over-engineered shit like Swing.

I'm not saying Java code isn't very portable, and there are some notable exceptions (the IntelliJ/JetBrains products always are first to come to mind) of successful cross platform Java client apps.

But much of the original late 90s hype about Java was its cross platform nature, especially in the browser, but Java applets and other in-browser Java technologies were never popular (consider GMail and other GWT apps were written in Java but compiled down to Javascript).

Java owes 90%+ of its ubiquity and longevity to its success on the server.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#106

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

Ironically, while Java was the original "write once, run anywhere" language, it never succeeded in that regard (e.g. browser applets were never popular). Ironically, I believe Javascript has. I was pretty much exclusively a Java programmer for the first decade and a half of my career, before moving to Node and TypeScript. I don't think I could ever go back at the point. Most importantly, this is my first time where t…

Though it’s technically _not_ Java, Kotlin has been a breath of fresh air for us in the last year. We tried it on a few smaller projects and it took off like wildfire throughout our team.

I write a lot of JavaScript (typescript included) and I have found it to be a very nice combination of things I like from both Java/JavaScript.

Admittedly I have been primarily writing Java for the last 15 years and consider JavaScript a second language for me, you may find Kotlin gives you a good reason to come back to the JVM (where it makes sense to of course).

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#107
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defence of Java, I read somewhere it's 25 years old ;-) Part of the reason for its success has been its strong commitment to backward compatibility, so it's to be expected that it might accumulate many ways of doing things. Python wisdom tells us this is often a Bad Thing. [0] I imagine Java's approach to concurrency and parallelism might be quite different if it were designed today. [0] https://wiki.python.org/mo…

Actually BEAM and Erlang pre-dates Java. ;-) As for compatibility: why is Java 8 market share so high in 2020?

Shitty Android.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#108

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

Ironically, while Java was the original "write once, run anywhere" language, it never succeeded in that regard (e.g. browser applets were never popular). Ironically, I believe Javascript has. I was pretty much exclusively a Java programmer for the first decade and a half of my career, before moving to Node and TypeScript. I don't think I could ever go back at the point. Most importantly, this is my first time where t…

Is there any major player or project doing backends in JS?

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#109
post #50

The biggest mistake Oracle did with Java was being hostile to Android community with the goal to extract some money from Google. A significant reason for Java to be relevant even today is Android.

The biggest mistake Google did was to screw Sun and not buying it when they had the opportunity to do so, most likely hoping it would sink without a hiss.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#110

I'm surprised that GraalVM is not mentioned. I have strong suspicions that Oracle is lining up Graal to become the next default JVM, after watching some talks from core developers describing how fragile the Hotspot codebase has become. Graal would be a good way to encourage ML, given it has language support for Python. Perhaps Graal is just not ready for Oracle to show all of their cards at this point. Or perhaps my…

No need for suspicions, that is officially known as Project Metropolis.
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