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Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

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Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#121

Post by pjmlp »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #87
yagodragon wrote: post #12

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…

How come?

I do it daily during most of those 25 years, developing on Windows, deploying across multiple flavours of UNIX.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#122

Post by cuddlecake »

haolez wrote: post #92
yagodragon wrote: post #12

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…

Java is a language that protects your investment. If you write code for it today, it will probably run and be easily deployable in the future by default. The same cannot be said for Python and JavaScript, for example. At least not by default.

Not sure if being "deployable" is an issue, considering docker exists. So, anything is deployable in the future by default, given a machine running the correct docker image.

Or am I misinterpreting the argument?

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#123

Post by pjmlp »

cesarb wrote: post #82
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the libraries. They're like Barbie - they have everything . You need, say, to store affine transforms in your SQL database? Java can bridge those very different worlds. (It literally has affine transforms in the library.)

> I think it's the libraries. [...] they have everything. On the other hand, they need to have everything. In many other languages, it's common to just use a library written in a different language. For some reason, the foreign function interface of Java seems to have been designed to be hard to use, so instead of using an already existing library, Java developers tend to go through the route of "Rewrite It In Java".

That was indeed done on purpose, Mark Reinhold has had a talk about it once, but as noted on the sibling comment that is being fixed.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#124

Post by spullara »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #105
coldtea wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ironically if Java developers had used the built in DOM APIs instead of the Applet canvas crap, we probably would have had great SPAs a lot earlier.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#125

Post by matsemann »

mrjoelkemp wrote: post #32
yagodragon wrote: post #12

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…

I hardly know anything about those things, and write java backends powering one of the most used services in my country. So I disagree with it being that complicated.

If you write the service stateless it's incredible what you can achieve with a couple small instances of a default spring boot container.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#126

Post by spullara »

cuddlecake wrote: post #122
haolez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java is a language that protects your investment. If you write code for it today, it will probably run and be easily deployable in the future by default. The same cannot be said for Python and JavaScript, for example. At least not by default.

Not sure if being "deployable" is an issue, considering docker exists. So, anything is deployable in the future by default, given a machine running the correct docker image. Or am I misinterpreting the argument?

Java code will run on the new ARM machines Apple will ship. Running your Docker code in the same environment is not going to be pleasant.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#127

Post by spullara »

coliveira wrote: post #39
yagodragon wrote: post #12

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…

The main problem with Java is its concurrency model, which gives incentive to the creation of threads that fight for resources and introduce bugs. This seemed a wise choice in the 90s, but as concurrency has increased several-fold in the last 25 years, the model cannot scale to real software needs. It is the Java equivalent to pointers in C.

Amusingly, Loom, which will likely appear in the Java 17 time-frame will allow you to use all that blocking code and it automatically transforms it into non-blocking code. Going to make coding high-concurrency applications a lot easier. Check out the few lines of code needed to convert Jetty from blocking to non-blocking:

https://github.com/rodrigovedovato/jetty-loom/blob/master/sr...

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#128

Post by spullara »

philipkglass wrote: post #118
throwaway189262 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not always true. Most of the time when Java uses a ton of memory it's because people use the default memory settings. If you tell Java to use up to 90% of system RAM, it will. Garbage collection is expensive so it will delay until memory is depleted. This is a different GC design than V8 and Go, which use older collector designs with high overhead. They need to collect very frequently because their stop the wo…

I'll shamefully admit that I have been running and writing JVM based services for years and I didn't know this. I thought that the fixed memory overhead for a simple JVM service was simply higher than with CPython as a fact of life. There are times when I'd happily trade more frequent GC pauses for a smaller per-process memory footprint. How do you find a reasonably small Xmx that doesn't lead to OutOfMemoryError exc…

Depends on your application and how much memory you actually need. I would also use ZGC as it returns unused memory to the system and low ms maximum pause times for terabytes of heap.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#129

Post by therealx »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #105
coldtea wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The successful cross platform apps usually are in a space where having a non-native GUI is accepted.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#130

Post by therealx »

spullara wrote: post #124
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically if Java developers had used the built in DOM APIs instead of the Applet canvas crap, we probably would have had great SPAs a lot earlier.

True, and if gui libraries stuck with common widgets that were cross platform, we would already have a long term native cross platform GUI toolkit.
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