Worth remembering how much marketing effort and money there was in pushing Java in the 90s:
Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#112Java 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…
I miss writing Java 1.4 with Eclipse and svn. Even though I am also super-happy with Ruby and Swift today, I know that control-space flow. Good times!
Edit: 1.4, not 1.7
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#113Been coding on the JVM for a good chunk of my career. Though the last several years has been in languages other than Java - Scala, Clojure (my personal favorite), and Kotlin.
Finally managed to get a job offer (after being unemployed for a bit) doing Python. It's starting to look like demand for JVM experience is beginning to wane. Might be time to move on anyway :shrug:
I'm old... as long as there's a steady paycheck involved, I'll code in whatever language you say.
Though, currently working on a little personal project in Scala. :)
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I know that what you said is supposed to be true. However in my real world experience it is anything but. Cisco java programs are a disaster and require certain JVMs to run.
The enterprise Java applications we use require specific versions of specific Linux distros. It's possible that they would run on other distros, or even other operating systems, if you got the right JVM. But there's enough question about it that the companies that sell them for a substantial price aren't willing to promise even a little portability.
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that and the portability are really incredible and underrated. It is funny, because I constantly hear things like "write once, debug everywhere", but I have yet to see an alternative that has a higher probability of working everywhere. Although Python is pretty close, if you exclude Windows (and don't we all want to do that?).
I can run basically any Perl code back to Perl 4 (March 1991) on Perl 5.40.2 which is current. I can run the same code on DOS, BeOS, Amiga, Atari ST, any of the BSDs, Linux distros, macOS, OS X, Windows, HP/UX, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OSF/1, Tru64, z/OS, Android, classic Mac, and more. This takes nothing away from Java and the Java ecosystem though. The JVM allows around the same number of target systems to run not one…
Interesting about that long list of languages.
There's also Groovy.
I wonder what other languages run on the JVM. What about Perl, Icon, SNOBOL, Prolog, Forth, Rexx, Nim, MUMPS, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, Rust, BASIC, Rebol, Haxe, Red, etc.?
Partly facetious question, because I think there are some limitations in some cases that prevent it (not sure, but a language being too closely tied to Unix or hardware could be why), but also serious. Since the JVM platform has all that power and performance, some of these languages could benefit from that, I'm guessing.
#lazyweb
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that and the portability are really incredible and underrated. It is funny, because I constantly hear things like "write once, debug everywhere", but I have yet to see an alternative that has a higher probability of working everywhere. Although Python is pretty close, if you exclude Windows (and don't we all want to do that?).
I often run into problems running Python code under Linux. I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java. But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.
Honestly, it isn't just you. I had to hold off on 3.13 for quite a while too, because of various package conflicts. It isn't terrible, especially thanks to things like pyenv, but it is far from perfect.
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#117I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with). It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, becau…
My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#118I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with). It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, becau…
same! mid-way through my almost 3 decade career I got bored and thought lets try some non-JVM projects, for 2 years I took projects using other languages etc… worse two years of my career :)
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#119Java stagnated for a while, but has now picked up steam. With things like GraalVM, the stellar ecosystem, generally very good performance and changes to the language, it is more and more pleasant to use.
It may not be cool to use Java for startups, but we do and are immensely productive with it.
Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling
#120I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with). It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, becau…
Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development.
Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method with such a horrible signature that i never can be sure. in the end i recoded the thing with macros instead).
The feeling of typesafety is satisfying , i agree. But calling the overall experience a "joy" ?