Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling • Hacker News Board

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#191

Post by frontfor » Fri, May 16, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

arccy wrote: post #142

sapiogram wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

funny. java is known for its stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together to see the whole thing and it still doesn't tell you anything useful about why the app crashed.

Compared to Go where I always have to remember to print the stack trace in every goroutine’s panic handler or use a custom error type that includes the stack trace or I get nothing? And I have to do this very basic thing for every service I spin up? This might not matter for pet projects or CLI applications, but it matters a lot in large scale mission critical servers.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#192

Post by wokkel » Fri, May 16, 2025, 11:50 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #141

nelup20 wrote: post #106

I 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…

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#193

Post by astura » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #141

nelup20 wrote: post #106

I 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…

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

C# isn't popular in startups for the same reason Java isn't, it's "boring."

It's an extremely common language in "boring" companies doing "boring" (but profitable) work.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#194

Post by wpollock » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

whartung wrote: post #152

overfeed wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I prefer the Go ecosystem to Java is cultural, rather than technical. Sure, the JVM is very impressive and the language has been evolving, but the culture around Java seems to encourage needless complexity. Of all the languages I've had to work with trying to get to know unfamiliar code-bases, it's the Go codebases I've been quickest to grok, and yielded the fewest surprises since as the code I'm looking f…

The don't embrace that culture. Embrace a simpler culture. Strive for simplicity. Push for fewer dependencies. Simple example, JAX-RS running on top of Java SE. I agree, JAX-RS is not what one might call "simple". It IS complex, or I should say, it CAN be complex. But Happy Path, staying in the middle of the road, it's pretty sweet for knocking out HTTP backed services. The Jersey reference implementation will do mos…

You've made your point, but note the built-in HTTPS server only supports TLS 1.2, so don't use that for production code. (For testing it's probably fine.)

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#195

Post by Pet_Ant » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:07 AM UTC

fpoling wrote: post #93

brightball wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an excellent point too. It always made me wonder why I hear about companies who are running very old versions of Java though. It always seemed like backwards compatibility would make keeping up to date with the latest an almost automatic thing.

Java version updates typically change GC behavior. If one has highly tuned setup there is no guarantee that a newer version would not regress. Another problem is crashes. Java runtime is highly reliable, but still bugs happens.

Are you talking about performance or behaviour? I’ve never seen an issue caused by a GC.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#196

Post by easton » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:19 AM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #183

kllrnohj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

One area where C# really messed up is exception handling. See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

They intentionally chose to not have checked exceptions though, and people have different opinions on it. They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway instead of selecting on a very specific type (which is often how it works, in web apps anyway.)

https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#197

Post by Pet_Ant » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:23 AM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #96

js8 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> syntactically compatible with C++ Not. And certainly not semantically.

That’s just obtuse. Compare Lisp, Forth, APL, Prolog, Ada, or Fortran. Java is just C++ with a few twists. You can literally write code that will compile in both.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#198

Post by runjake » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:29 AM UTC

cgh wrote: post #170

bsaul wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.

Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.

IOW Linux on the server?

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#199

Post by runjake » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:30 AM UTC

wokkel wrote: post #192

kllrnohj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.

AFIACT, either most or at least a significant percentage of dotnet code runs on Linux, depending on the industry.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#200

Post by neonsunset » Sat, May 17, 2025, 12:34 AM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #183

kllrnohj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

One area where C# really messed up is exception handling. See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.