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Java was cool at allowing a couple of things nothing else did: applets, and an actually cross-platform language. But the language itself never seemed “cool” —
by zellyn 8y ago
Java was cool at allowing a couple of things nothing else did: applets, and an actually cross-platform language.
But the language itself never seemed “cool” — it horribly verbose even from the start. In fact, it's much better now than it was.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoJava was very definitely "cool" in the 90's.
- KirinDave 8y agoPlease consider that the competition was 1990's era C++. For every way Java's old versions were bad, C++ was bad in 3 distinct ways that often lead to program faults. Folks left old-C++-world like it was plague infested when they could, because it was a genuinely unforgiving environment to program in and no one took Objective-C seriously outside of the world of NeXTSTEP.
- ythn 8y ago> But the language itself never seemed “cool” The author of "Joy, Inc." disagrees with you https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/1591847125 https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/159...
- pjmlp 8y agoIt was surely cool in 1996, vs Frankenstein C compilers still stuck between K&R C and Ansi C (hello aCC), C++ compilers playing catch up with ongoing ISO work. Then there was VB 6, Delphi, Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-3, Component Pascal, Smalltalk, Common Lisp and a few others more. Big difference was that Sun was giving the JDK away for free every way they could. Magazine CDs, conferences, sending them free by post, whatever. I was on my last year and everything that had to do with distributed conputing or compiler development switched to Java. With teachers carrying Java branded bags.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoTwo other cool things about Java: The library. It had everything. Garbage collection. You didn't have to keep track of when to free memory any more. If you were in C or C++, this meant a major headache just... went away. (If you were in Common Lisp, well, you never had that headache in the first place...)
- pjmlp 8y agoQuite true. I already used Oberon, Caml Light, Prolog and Smalltalk by then, but it was the way Sun was pushing it no matter what that actually made it mainstream, regarding GC adoption. If I am not mistaken it was Guy Steele that stated it brought developers half way to Scheme. As for the library I remember the first commercial Java collections based on the ongoing C++ STL work, before Java 1.2 adopted their own, with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones. C++ on those days had each compiler vendor provide their own view of what a C++ framework should look like, and although RAII was already a thing, very few of them already offered some way of doing smart pointers, with the exception of COM wrappers.
- igouy 8y ago> As for the library … with a few similarities to Smalltalk ones. And the recapitulation of emulated versus native Smalltalk UIs, with Swing versus SWT.
- pjmlp 8y agoYeah, the error there was that Swing does not have the right defaults, so it does require some graphical programming skills to make nice UI experiences out of it, or buying component libraries. And since a large majority doesn't bother to read books like Filthy Rich Clients, the outcome isn't the best.
- igouy 8y ago> …nothing else did … cross-platform language Au contraire! http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf http://www.davethomas.net/papers/ubiquitous1995.pdf