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Enterprises dislike unnecessary change, so they wouldn't abandon java even if there was a technically more suitable alternative - they stuck with COBOL long aft

Enterprises dislike unnecessary change, so they wouldn't abandon java even if there was a technically more suitable alternative - they stuck with COBOL long after C was established. They will stick with java for a LONG time, not for a good time. Yet, java was (as someone recently disparagingly put it) "designed by adults". By people familiar with state of the art language research, what was needed and workable, comprehensive specs of language and VM, and complete stdlibs, docs and tools from the get-go. (That is, disparaging to other languages) And it's also managed to keep up to date, much better than I'd ever have thought: fast JVMs, language evolution, stdlib extended - and perhaps the greatest number of 3rd party libraries of any language ever(?). Oracle is wrecking that for EE, and may wreck more.

nix0n 10y ago
Can Java EE be developed on OpenJDK? Can OpenJDK create a fork of the whole Java ecosystem when Oracle wrecks it?
- geodel 10y ago
  I think the fundamental issue which many people do not want to admit is that Oracle puts humongous money in Java and Java EE(in past at least). Without that all the Java activists and Java EE guardians etc are unlikely to ship large working products like new versions of Java/JavaEE.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    This. Also, despite the general hatred of Oracle, something else that is hard to admit is they've managed Java a lot better than Sun has done. The people building Java now are long-term team members who clearly weren't recognised and elevated by Sun, but who have been by Oracle. Love 'em or hate 'em, Oracle didn't turn into a factory farm of cash cows by being entirely incompetent.
acdha 10y ago
> Enterprises dislike unnecessary change, so they wouldn't abandon java even if there was a technically more suitable alternative - they stuck with COBOL long after C was established This isn't a great comparison because C was, and still is, a much lower-level language than COBOL. If you're looking at that from the perspective of a large organization with millions of lines of code, it's hard to justify the claim that C is “technically more suitable”, because the things C does better are largely irrelevant to business apps while the ISO standard for COBOL includes a ton of higher-level features like an indexed database, first-class support for fixed-precision math (a hard requirement for financial apps), a form library, object orientation, etc. which would need to be maintained as library dependencies in C. Any COBOL programmer would be familiar those but each C developer would need to get used to each application's particular selection of libraries. A better comparison would something like Java or .Net which both have standard answers for most of those questions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, were quickly adopted by companies trying to move new development away from COBOL. As far back as the mid-90s, a popular approach was to move the front-end into Java (or, later, a web app) and start chipping away at the decades of backend COBOL code running on a big central server.
hinkley 10y ago
I was an early Java adopter. And as much as I'm convinced that Larry Ellison hunts humans for sport, the fact of the matter is that Sun got dazzled by bullshit long before Oracle got their mits on it. The truth is, J2EE 1.0 was not designed by grown ups. It was designed by college kids and academics who ironically enough wouldn't know the 8 fallacies of network computing if it but them on the ass. Because it DID bite them on the ass and we have nearly 5 years of vendors flaunting and then polluting the spec to prove it. Then we have Josh Bloch, who everyone but me thinks is great, who introduced Duck Typing to the JDK (MethodNotImplementedException) and only later confessed that he couldn't understand variance. People defend their bad code by pointing to similar code in the JDK, and Bloch stunted the growth of an entire generation of developers. Then repeated the exact same mistakes at Google. Me, I'm waiting for a language that Bloch had nothing to do with, and I want to get back to working in limited resource environments. My eye is on Rust right now, and I have my fingers crossed.

nix0n 10y ago

Can Java EE be developed on OpenJDK? Can OpenJDK create a fork of the whole Java ecosystem when Oracle wrecks it?

geodel 10y ago
I think the fundamental issue which many people do not want to admit is that Oracle puts humongous money in Java and Java EE(in past at least). Without that all the Java activists and Java EE guardians etc are unlikely to ship large working products like new versions of Java/JavaEE.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  This. Also, despite the general hatred of Oracle, something else that is hard to admit is they've managed Java a lot better than Sun has done. The people building Java now are long-term team members who clearly weren't recognised and elevated by Sun, but who have been by Oracle. Love 'em or hate 'em, Oracle didn't turn into a factory farm of cash cows by being entirely incompetent.

acdha 10y ago

> Enterprises dislike unnecessary change, so they wouldn't abandon java even if there was a technically more suitable alternative - they stuck with COBOL long after C was established This isn't a great comparison because C was, and still is, a much lower-level language than COBOL. If you're looking at that from the perspective of a large organization with millions of lines of code, it's hard to justify the claim that C is “technically more suitable”, because the things C does better are largely irrelevant to business apps while the ISO standard for COBOL includes a ton of higher-level features like an indexed database, first-class support for fixed-precision math (a hard requirement for financial apps), a form library, object orientation, etc. which would need to be maintained as library dependencies in C. Any COBOL programmer would be familiar those but each C developer would need to get used to each application's particular selection of libraries. A better comparison would something like Java or .Net which both have standard answers for most of those questions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, were quickly adopted by companies trying to move new development away from COBOL. As far back as the mid-90s, a popular approach was to move the front-end into Java (or, later, a web app) and start chipping away at the decades of backend COBOL code running on a big central server.

hinkley 10y ago

I was an early Java adopter. And as much as I'm convinced that Larry Ellison hunts humans for sport, the fact of the matter is that Sun got dazzled by bullshit long before Oracle got their mits on it. The truth is, J2EE 1.0 was not designed by grown ups. It was designed by college kids and academics who ironically enough wouldn't know the 8 fallacies of network computing if it but them on the ass. Because it DID bite them on the ass and we have nearly 5 years of vendors flaunting and then polluting the spec to prove it. Then we have Josh Bloch, who everyone but me thinks is great, who introduced Duck Typing to the JDK (MethodNotImplementedException) and only later confessed that he couldn't understand variance. People defend their bad code by pointing to similar code in the JDK, and Bloch stunted the growth of an entire generation of developers. Then repeated the exact same mistakes at Google. Me, I'm waiting for a language that Bloch had nothing to do with, and I want to get back to working in limited resource environments. My eye is on Rust right now, and I have my fingers crossed.