If they invest as much in marketing as they did, yes. Just look at the success of mongodb.
Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#22Well, for one, the notion that it was 'write once run anywhere' wouldn't convince too many people - after all, everyone's already got a language called LiveScript in their browsers and that's turned out to be good enough for 90% of use cases.
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#23Instead of answering the question, I'd like to point out how different the world of programming might look today WITHOUT Java. Java was the first maintstream GC language (no more malloc), fully object oriented and the first byte code based VM language. Prior to Java, you were either writing in interpreted languages like Perl or in C/C++. Java brought programming to a higher standard with clear syntax, easy of use and…
The only connection between Java and JavaScript is that JavaScript stole Java's name as a marketing ploy for Netscape scripting. (I would call JS a competitor to Java applets, but it wasn't even that. It was a complementary technology.)
And "mainstream" only referred to marketing budget. Perl and Python and Tcl had already launched (Perl and Tcl quite popular for the era.) Java's main novelty was the relatively strong cross-platform story due to the VM and GUI bindings.
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#24Not at all. Java's rise was the perfect storm of several factors: object orientation taken to its logical conclusion during a huge IT hype period for it (much like "Big Data" today), the tail end of a huge explosion of CPU architectures which made VMs very attractive, and CPU power finally getting to the point where pervasive garbage collection wasn't a detriment to large systems. The platform as we have today is sim…
object orientation taken to its logical conclusion Oh, how I wish. OO was never taken to its logical conclusion in the mainstream at all. Java's Nygaard-style OO was just a sugar coating on top of a generic procedural paradigm and a far cry from Smalltalk's example that was set over 20 years prior. Ironically, much of the JVM's early optimizations were born out of research into the Self VM - a prototype-based OO Smal…
OO's death has been exaggerated. Take a language like Scala, which has really powerful OOP constructs in the form of mixin-style traits (at least on the static side of object innovation). Not to mention many of the strongtalk people are now working Dart.
Objects will rise again (if you think they've fallen, that is).
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#25Instead of answering the question, I'd like to point out how different the world of programming might look today WITHOUT Java. Java was the first maintstream GC language (no more malloc), fully object oriented and the first byte code based VM language. Prior to Java, you were either writing in interpreted languages like Perl or in C/C++. Java brought programming to a higher standard with clear syntax, easy of use and…
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Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
object orientation taken to its logical conclusion Oh, how I wish. OO was never taken to its logical conclusion in the mainstream at all. Java's Nygaard-style OO was just a sugar coating on top of a generic procedural paradigm and a far cry from Smalltalk's example that was set over 20 years prior. Ironically, much of the JVM's early optimizations were born out of research into the Self VM - a prototype-based OO Smal…
OO's death has been exaggerated. Take a language like Scala, which has really powerful OOP constructs in the form of mixin-style traits (at least on the static side of object innovation). Not to mention many of the strongtalk people are now working Dart. Objects will rise again (if you think they've fallen, that is).
I agree somewhat. You can also find object models in plenty of other places where many don't realize it (e.g. in many practical implementations of actor model concurrency). Those are all relatively small and indirect victories though. Who knows - maybe pure message passing languages might become the next fad soon enough.
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#27Absolutely. The only thing really keeping Java from taking over the world is a slightly outdated standard lib. It's a great combination of speed, portability, community, OO, native types, functional prototypes and some clear lines drawn so you can't shoot yourself in the foot too terribly bad. Oracle's API architects are concerned with selling as much WebLogic licenses as possible however, so don't expect changes soo…
Well and Java evolution stalled for 5 years during the Sun to Oracle transition, while the rest of the world passed it by. Java 8 should have launched by 2010.
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#28If they invest as much in marketing as they did, yes. Just look at the success of mongodb.
Java was the original Web Scale.
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#29Instead of answering the question, I'd like to point out how different the world of programming might look today WITHOUT Java. Java was the first maintstream GC language (no more malloc), fully object oriented and the first byte code based VM language. Prior to Java, you were either writing in interpreted languages like Perl or in C/C++. Java brought programming to a higher standard with clear syntax, easy of use and…
The only connection between Java and JavaScript is that JavaScript stole Java's name as a marketing ploy for Netscape scripting. (I would call JS a competitor to Java applets, but it wasn't even that. It was a complementary technology.) And "mainstream" only referred to marketing budget. Perl and Python and Tcl had already launched (Perl and Tcl quite popular for the era.) Java's main novelty was the relatively stron…
To further that point, JavaScript is more similar to Scheme if anything.
Re: Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
#30What are the other assumptions in this hypothetical scenario? Does C# exist? Does Scala exist? Does F# exist? You could argue that none of these would exist if Java didn't.
What might we have instead? C/C++ of course, Python/Perl/Ruby and friends too. QBASIC is older than Java and Visual Basic was just a cleaned up QBASIC, so we'd have that. Borland's Pascal-derivative Delphi was a decent language; maybe that would've done better without Java.
Would Haskell and the MLs have done better? Perhaps, because at the time it came around Java was quite a productive language. Or maybe I should say, it was a nice language before everybody and their uncle discovered the design patterns book and started implementing AbstractFactoryInterpreterEventLists willy-nilly. Without Java, I think it's plausible that the design pattern craze - a lot of which is just attempting to shoehorn functional programming into an OO language - would never have happened. And people might've discovered actual functional programming earlier and the state of the art might've been closer to F# than C#. So back to the original question, in this scenario, Java wouldn't make it, because honestly, although Java is a decent language but F# and friends are way better.