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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#201

Post by astrange »

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.

> 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.

There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it.

I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#202

Post by antod »

hu3 wrote: post #174
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.

I don't see Java being any better in this regard. Microsoft has been historically much less aggressive with lawyers compared to Oracle.

The poster was talking about the ecosystem not the core platform. The wider Java ecosystem was heavily dominated by many Apache (and other) open source libraries vs commercial products for the C# ecosystem.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#203

Post by breadwinner »

easton wrote: post #196
breadwinner wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway

Their belief was wrong. Microsoft now recommends against catching Exception.

The article you linked to is addressed at the bottom of this article: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#204

Post by breadwinner »

neonsunset wrote: post #200
breadwinner wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code

That's so ignorant. Read the article please.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#205

Post by astrange »

znpy wrote: post #18
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…

> 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, w…

I'm honestly amazed people say this about Java, because the language almost couldn't be worse at giving you tools to use memory efficiently.

There's no value types (outside primitives) and everything is about pointer chasing. And surely if there was less pointer chasing it'd be easier to do the GC work at the same time.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#206

Post by TacticalCoder »

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.

[dead]

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#207

Post by astrange »

fidotron wrote: post #15
jgneff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :)

It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#208

Post by neonsunset »

antod wrote: post #202
hu3 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see Java being any better in this regard. Microsoft has been historically much less aggressive with lawyers compared to Oracle.

The poster was talking about the ecosystem not the core platform. The wider Java ecosystem was heavily dominated by many Apache (and other) open source libraries vs commercial products for the C# ecosystem.

Most of the features that require Apache or community packages in Java ship out of box in .NET (or via extension packages).

They also tend to be of higher quality and provide better performance.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#209

Post by neonsunset »

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.

Quite a few languages "loved" by "Linux communities" tend to have rather rudimentary integration with Linux kernel's facilities or worse packaging story.

For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#210

Post by jjav »

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.

> stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together

If you wrote code with such deep stacktraces, it's all on you.

There's a performance cost to all that excessive stack depth too, often.

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