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Ha. I built my first company on Java back in 1996. It was a terrible decision. Very buggy, lots of BS from Sun & Oracle that was really more about Ellison and M
by drumdance 11y ago
Ha. I built my first company on Java back in 1996. It was a terrible decision. Very buggy, lots of BS from Sun & Oracle that was really more about Ellison and McNealy envying Bill Gates. Netscape made a similarly bad decision when they tried to create a pure Java version of the browser.
I'm sure Java is 10x better now, but I'm not convinced it will be here in 2100.
- bdamm 11y agoIt will be, because there is now more Java running business processes than there is Cobol, and Cobol is surprisingly still with us. Profitable code dies hard.
- drumdance 11y agoI don't think there's any 85 year old Cobol though. Most of the S&P 500 is less than 50. It's entirely conceivable the companies that embrace new technologies starting today will, within 50 years, extinguish or acquire most of the of the companies using technologies from 1995.
- threeseed 11y agoWhat ? Of all the languages Java is the most likeliest to be around in 2100. It is the lingua de franca of enterprise software development. In every sense it is the modern day Fortran/Cobol.
- drumdance 11y agoCobol was the modern day Cobol in 1995, and that was just 20 years ago. 85 years is a long time.
- facepalm 11y ago1995? Are you sure? I started studying maths and computer science in 1993 and Cobol was ever only mentioned as a remote curiosity. I remember Pascal, Perl and C/C++ were common.
- drumdance 11y agoYes but it was still dominant in terms of actual code in production. I remember working at a consulting firm then and we had a ton of work in Cobol and JCL. Banks in particular but also telecom. Client-server 4GLs were really starting to take off -- PowerBuilder, Visual Basic -- but those got washed away with the web.