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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#21

Post by izacus »

cloudking wrote: post #5

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

Because there was nothing else quite like it at the time most enterprise software was created or recreated.

And it's still stable, fast and reliable with a massive ecosystem of stable, fast and reliable libraries and software. With good developer tooling, profilers and debuggers to go with it. And big enterprise support teams from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, etc. throwing in their (paid) support services.

It might not be the best language in any of the categories (speed - runtime and compile time, tooling, ecosystem, portability, employee pool), but there's pretty much almost no languages that are as good in all categories at once.

And to top it off, JVM can host other languages so it can easily interoperate with more modern takes on language design like Kotlin while still running on pretty much all major operating systems used in the wild and most CPU architectures as well. It'll run on your car's SoC, your phone and on your server. In many cases, using the same libraries and same code underneath.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#23

Post by fidotron »

hackthemack wrote: post #8
cloudking wrote: post #5

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.

What was the viable alternative?

Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure.

At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#24

Post by dragandj »

exabrial wrote: post #16
dragandj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Many Clojure tutorials are free! It's difficult to say without knowing nothing about your preference and experience. Everyone's welcome to join Clojure Slack community (for example) which has several tens of thousands of members and dedicated beginners channel. I'm sure if you asked there, you'd get tons of recommendations tailored to you. https://clojurians.slack.com/

(BTW Clojure, as a Lisp dialect, has almost no syntax. You can learn THAT in 5 minutes. The challenge is in training your programming mind to think in totally new concepts)

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#25

Post by brightball »

exabrial wrote: 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…

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier.

Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so poor until it started improving around 2006-2007.

Now I keep an eye on it for other languages that run on the JVM: JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, etc.

IMO JRuby is the most interesting since you gain access to 2 very mature ecosystems by using it. When Java introduced Project Loom and made it possible to use Ruby's Fibers on the JVM via Virtual Threads it was a win for both.

Charles Nutter really doesn't get anywhere close to enough credit for his work there.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#26

Post by keeganpoppen »

lemonwaterlime wrote: post #11
cloudking wrote: post #5

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.

on one level this is clearly “shipping the org chart”, but… honestly, even as no fan of Java this is clearly efficient on many levels, especially when you consider the humans and org to be part of the system (which everyone should. or it’s just my HCI brain talking.).

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#27

Post by cogman10 »

brightball wrote: post #25
exabrial wrote: 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…

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier. Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so…

Let me extol the virtues of Java the language.

You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this day without recompiling it.

Both Ruby and Python, with pedigrees nearly as old as Java's, have made changes to their languages which make things look better, but ultimately break things. Heck, C++ tends to have so many undefined quirks and common compiler extensions that it's not uncommon to see code that only compiles with specific C++ compilers.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#28

Post by js8 »

izacus wrote: post #21
cloudking wrote: post #5

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

Because there was nothing else quite like it at the time most enterprise software was created or recreated. And it's still stable, fast and reliable with a massive ecosystem of stable, fast and reliable libraries and software. With good developer tooling, profilers and debuggers to go with it. And big enterprise support teams from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, etc. throwing in their (paid) support services. It might not be th…

I believe there were alternatives at the time, but expensive. Java was free and also syntactically compatible with C++. I think that rather these properties (than being somewhat unique) are the main causes of its success.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#29

Post by nxobject »

exabrial wrote: 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…

Third best consistently used over 3 decades adds up to a great, great deal. Although, to be fair, a great deal has been invested in cutting edge GCs for the JVM – some fresh out of research.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#30

Post by jbellis »

exabrial wrote: 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…

more like 100x faster than Python/Ruby

and that's before you throw in real multithreading

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