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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#81

Post by loloquwowndueo »

cestith wrote: post #50
bhaak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python can be tricky with the big differences between 2 and 3.

Python 3 came out in 2008. If the 2 vs 3 differences are still biting you you probably have bigger problems to solve (deprecated, insecure, unmaintained dependencies for example).

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#82

Post by eppp »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
brightball wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier. Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so…

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.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#83

Post by sigzero »

cestith wrote: post #49
_ea1k wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

> 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.

No, you really can't. Not anything significant anyway. There are too many deviations between some of those systems to all you to run the same code.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#84

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bhaak wrote: post #45
_ea1k wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

It's not you. Python packaging has regressed into a worse mess than it was 20 years ago. I limit myself to simple scripts that only rely on builtins. Anything more complicated goes to a more dependable language.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#85

Post by icedchai »

cestith wrote: post #50
bhaak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python can be tricky with the big differences between 2 and 3.

As late as 2022, I was at a company still in the middle of "migrating" from 2 to 3. I wouldn't be surprised if the migration project was still going on. The system had gone beyond tech debt and was bordering on bankruptcy.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#86

Post by octo888 »

neonsunset wrote: post #76
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, starting with .NET 6 there is a pure C# threadpool implementation that acts differently under problematic scenarios. We're seeing this issue entirely in .NET core. We started on .NET 6, are currently on .NET 8, and will likely migrate to 10 soon after it is released. It's again worth mentioning that you provide zero evidence that .NET 6 solves this problem in any way. Although, as we will see below, it…

To me a claim "how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong" borders on insanity if we consider having to interact with Maven or even Gradle on a daily basis after .NET's CLI and NuGet, or having to deal with type erasure in generics, or weird stream API shape, or not having common slice and sequence types that everything nicely unifies under because primitives cannot be generalized, or not bein…

> having to tolerate Hibernate after EF Core,

Enjoying or tolerating Hibernate is undiagnosed Stockholm Syndrome :D

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#87

Post by Terr_ »

tootie wrote: post #41
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…

The language has/had some rough edges that have been improved over the years, but the developer experience of using a strongly-typed, object-oriented language within a sturdy IDE like Idea is just second to none. The debugging process is so very straightforward. Java became synonymous with enterprisey bloated systems for good reason, but there is no pile of mud Java system that can't be stepped through cleanly with a…

I find these discussions have an interior split between the folks who are more concerned with getting the feature out now versus the folks who have had to keep a thousand ancient features running.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#88

Post by octo888 »

cloudking wrote: post #5

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

It's safe. It's easy to hire anyone from anywhere to write Java. You generally can't create an ungodly mess apart from layers and thousands of classes. There's a library for almost everything. It'll still be around in 10/20 years. It's good enough

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#89

Post by kccqzy »

whartung wrote: post #75

Ode to Java. Boy, I love Java. When I switched jobs way back, a condition was that the new project was going be using Java. GC. Single file modules. No "forward". The Collection suite. Fast compiles. The magic of the ClassLoader. The ClassLoader, that was insightful. I don't know how much thought went into that when they came up with it, but, wow. That ClassLoader is behind a large swath of Java magic. It really hasn…

The servlet really is a powerful concept behind a bad name. I've seen more than once where people reinvent servlets in other languages.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#90

Post by aardvark179 »

javier2 wrote: post #63
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 syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable This is something I greatly value with the recent changes to Java. They found a great way to include sealed classes, switch expression, project Loom, records that feels at home in the existing Java syntax. The tooling with heap dump analyzers, thread dump analyzers, GC analyzers is also top notch.

I think Gavin Bierman is an unsung hero as far as steering the Java language is concerned. I had the privilege to sit next to him in the office when I was working on TruffleRuby, and our conversations on language design were always elucidating, and his ability to gently steer others away from pitfalls was something I wish I could do as well.

Hearing the work he and others did to gradually introduce pattern matching without painting themselves into a corner was fascinating and inspiring.

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