Comment by travisgriggs
Comment by travisgriggs 3 days ago
Ah Java. The language I never got to love. I came of coding age during the “camps” era of object oriented stuff: Eiffel, Smalltalk, CLOS, C++, etc. Java, from 95ish to oh 98ish, was like a giant backdraft. Completely sucked the air out of the room for everything else.
Does anyone remember the full page ads in WSJ for programming language, that no on quite yet knew what it really was? So my formative impressions of Java on were emotional/irrational, enforced by comments like:
“Of Course Java will Work, there’s not a damn new thing in it” — James gosling, but I’ve always suspected this might be urban legend
“Java, all the elegance of C++ syntax with all the speed of Smalltalk” - Kent Beck or Jan Steinman
“20 years from now, we will still be talking about Java. Not because of its contributions to computer programming, but rather as a demonstration of how to market a language” — ??
I can code some in Java today (because, hey, GPT and friends!! :) ), but have elected to use Kotlin and have been moderately happy with that.
One thing that would be interesting about this list, is to break down the changes that changed/evolved the actual computation model that a programmer uses with it, vs syntactic sugar and library refinements. “Languages” with heavy footprints like this, are often just as much about their run time libraries and frameworks, as they are the actual methodology of how you compute results.
In the early days javascript wasn't far enough along that you could make a web app without a lot of compromises, and the cross-platform nature of java was a big, big plus. I worked on an internal java client application that was developed on Linux for end users on PC. Ten years after we released the first version, and while it was still under development, a group of powerful managers at our company demanded they be issued Macs instead of the PC corporate standard.
When IT asked us if our application worked on Mac, we shrugged and said "We don't have a Mac to test it. We've never run it on a Mac. We won't support it officially, so if there are Mac specific bugs you're on your own. But... it should work. Try it."
And it did work. All the Mac users had to do was click on our Webstart link just like the PC users. It installed itself properly and ran properly. Never had a single issue related to the OS. Before Java was introduced that was an unobtainable dream in a full-featured windowed application.