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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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11–20 of 437 posts

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#11

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

Among other things, because the structure of the code corresponds to the structure of the organization itself.

Things tend to form fractal systems of systems for efficiency. A cleanly delineated org chart maps to a cleanly delineated codebase.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#13

Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get re…

Both James Gosling (Java) and Rich Hickey (Clojure) are amazing creators! Each brought a breath of fresh air to programming at their respective times.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#14
post #7

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby. Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine. Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV…

Throw in Clojure into the mix, and you get superpowers!

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#15
post #4

Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get re…

I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building. I took the severance package when Talige…

I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#16
post #7

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby. Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine. Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV…

Throw in Clojure into the mix, and you get superpowers!

I'm still trying to mentally grok the Clojure model and syntax hah. On my todo list. Clojure users seem to love it though. Do you have a tutorial that could sell it to me?

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#18
post #7

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby. Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine. Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV…

> Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.

You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.

The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#19

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

Another way to look at it based on coming across it in enterprise:

How did he build something adopted by so many enterprises?

It does some things at scale very well and has been afforded the performance improvements of very smart people for 30y.

It’s not to say the language isn’t verbose, one of my favourite features was the ability to write code in other languages right inside the a Java app pretty well in-line by using the JVM, thanks to JSR-223.

It was possible to write Ruby or Python code via Jruby or Jython and run it in the JVM.

https://www.jython.org/

https://www.jruby.org/

Clojure also runs on the JVM.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/scrip...

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#20

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimmer that it was the "Enterprise Way" of doing "Real IT" programming for "Real Businesses". I am not saying any of that is the "Truth", just the perception that was held by the majority of people who could choose what to write enterprise code in.

> Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it

And Oracle (well before the Sun acquisition - in fact, control of Java was basically the main cause of that move).

Any technology that could bag both IBM and Oracle is (or rather was) likely to dominate the enterprise space.

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