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how common was it for languages to ship with robust IO, collections, and threading libraries? It might be that a lot of the good ideas in Java have become so co

• mattnewport 8y ago
  Java not only adopted a bad model of concurrency / parallelism, it enshrined it in the language in the form of language level synchronization / locking. True, it wasn't as widely appreciated at the time that it was a bad model but there were better alternatives out there even back then. The focus on a well defined memory model in the presence of parallelism is one thing Java can take some credit for but it is to some degree a consequence of the sub-optimal threading/locking model they adopted at the language level. The original collections library in Java was poor due to lack of generics. Again, there were better models out there and some of them were even in fairly wide use at the time (C++). Java is only recently catching up to better models for collections with streams that many other languages have been doing in some form for a long time. I don't have much of an opinion on Java IO or how it compared to contemporary alternatives but most languages have pretty robust support for basic IO in their standard libraries. What about Java do you think was particularly good for the time? One thing that I think Java deserves some credit for popularizing is reflection, although the Java model of dynamic reflection isn't what I'd pick if designing a language from scratch today.