One of the first programs I ever wrote - a program to find valid English crossword fills given a grid pattern with optional partial completions. This project came to mind recently and I looked around on the Wayback Machine. Turns out I posted the jar on MediaFire and linked to it on an old blog on Jan 2, 2011. Luckily, there was [_one capture_ of the jar on MediaFire]( https://web.archive.org/web/20240123154949/https…
I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
51–60 of 193 posts
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#52What a strong ad for Java
2011 for Java is nothing. I've used JDBC driver written for Java 1.4 (2002) in Java 17 and I absolutely sure that it'll work with Java 21 just as well. Java backwards compatibility is real and it works absolutely fine unless you do bad things.
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#53My son found some of my old java code from 20 years ago and managed to get a couple of the programs to run, with some very minor modifications. The java applets not so much, because no browser has had support for applets for a decade or so.
Use appletviewer. I have something from 1998 which still runs using that.
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#54If you are so inclined, a decompiler might be able to "recreate" a big part of the source code. IntelliJ IDEA's one (Fernflower) works well, its fork Vineflower seems like an interesting option too. Both are released under Apache 2. Fernflower works so well I don't always immediately notice I'm debugging decompiled code.
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#55Actually I did some somewhat impressive graphical x86 assembly programs around 1994-95 which I would have really liked to see today, but I saw no value in those once I had done them. :/
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#56The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived. I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database,…
Perl /4/ in 2002? When I learned perl in like 1995, 5 had been out for a bit already and it was hard to find a system with 4 installed... (perl 4 didn't have built in support for OO; did you roll your own system?)
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#57The wayback machine is pure nostalgia. Every time I go there I’m truly amazed at what it’s like to have a society wide memory that automatically captures these different moments of our lives. Old pictures I never thought I’d ever see again. Landing pages for old companies I’ve built and only a handful of my closest friends remember. Blog posts from long deleted places, times, and mental caverns. Just incredible.
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#58What a strong ad for Java
Java's maintained almost perfect backward compatibility. If you want code you wrote today to run in 10 more years, Java is probably the best choice. Most other languages have too much of a history of breaking changes, or if you pick C/C++, you'll have issues linking against an old UI library.
I won't doubt how java doing well, but other languages have it beat.
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#59What a strong ad for Java
You can still download a JVM for Java 21, but it's from weird third parties like Adoptium
Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs
#60I have Objective-C software for iOS that was built for iOS 3 that still runs on the latest version of iOS and people still pay for it. Strange how language stability is an achievable goal.