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IT Runs on Java 8

• torbjorn 7y ago
  IT runs on Java 8. IT in 2030 will not run on Java 8.
  • mda 7y ago
    It will be Java 15 then.
    • agumonkey 7y ago
      Or maybe Keystra
  • icedchai 7y ago
    You might be surprised. I know companies still using Java 5 almost 15 years after release...
  • idlewords 7y ago
    It will run on twigs and pebbles.
  • mrspeaker 7y ago
    Are you talking about Java 8 specifically, or are you saying that for some reason there is going to be a sea-change and corporate IT is going to start using all the buzzwords and tearing down their old systems? If it's the later, and seeing how much enterprise has shifted in the last 30 years... if I were a betting fellow I'd say big systems will still be Java 8 in ten years time. Mayyyybe a freshly discovered catastrophic flaw in the jvm causes them to upgrade a version!
    • dpc_pw 7y ago
      They won't tear down anything. But there will be more and more systems that were built using newer things, some which we consider cutting edge right now. Some companies will get acquired, some will go bankrupt and their old systems deprecated, etc.
  • TallGuyShort 7y ago
    Plenty of enterprise technologies have lasted more than 16 years. People are still paying good money to get help with software that's been running since the 60's. Less IT will be running on Java 8 by 2030. Maybe.
• pwinnski 7y ago
  HN might be pointing the way to the future. Or it might be overly focused on things that will never take the world by storm.
  • knightofmars 7y ago
    HN is pointing the way to the future... ...and all of the failed futures as well.
  • simion314 7y ago
    What I think we see are 1 languages or tech promoted by companies like Google, MS or FB 2 developers that self promote by creating a side project using the latest buzzwords and coolest languages of the month and sharing it, some do it for the CV but others do it for learning to see what is all about. HN can't predict the future, good tech can die because is not supported by a company with money, or the company that controls it is incompetent and kills it. I am still thinking that C# and .Net could have been more popular only if MS could have just open source it from the beginning, maybe we would have now a way to do cross platform WPF apps and running them in browser with an open source Silverlight
  • SeanDav 7y ago
    HN is a bit of an echo chamber. A very interesting and worthwhile echo chamber, but an echo chamber nevertheless. This is not a criticism, but probably an unavoidable by-product of how it works and the audience it attracts.
    • nurettin 7y ago
      Like some sort of colourful bird mating ritual, you have to append so many explanations so as to not offend someone's trigger-happy finger and lose karma.
    • OneWordSoln 7y ago
      It is also just plain old human nature.
  • pron 7y ago
• sanxiyn 7y ago
  HN is an early adopter community. If you want technical community, there are places like https://www.reddit.com/r/systems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/systems/. Edit: Disclaimer: I am one of moderators and this is a blatant advertisement.
  • idlewords 7y ago
    Speak for yourself, man. Lots of proud dinosaurs here, when it comes to deployed production systems.
    • sneak 7y ago
      Or even new ones. I’ve been given js+mongo apps by partners that I had to modify to use standard postgres before becoming responsible for herding them in prod. Not everyone chases the hype cycle.
    • knightofmars 7y ago
      When does one start counting oneself as a dinosaur? I'm pushing 15 years.
• bluejay2387 7y ago
  Probably one of the most true things I have ever read on this site.
  • timc3 7y ago
    But also so blindly obvious that I don’t know why she bothered. It’s not like it’s news
    • dang 7y ago
      The article explains that.
  • panpanna 7y ago
    The direction most comments here are taking kind of proves her point.
  • endorphone 7y ago
    It has been a sentiment that is posted on here just about monthly, and this is surely not the first time you've seen it. Usually it yields a lot of cynical posts with clever new phrases for whatever is new, as if there are a lot of people feeling really defensive for whatever they're using. HN is about the interesting parts of tech, pushing at the edges. Yet the vast majority of developers are developing vanilla IT processes in shops where they want it to be the most benign, easily transferable solution possible. The differential between the two isn't surprising or particularly interesting. It's an obvious outcome. And in ten years the stuff that people talked about on HN become the normal stuff at those IT shops, and HN will be onto something else. And on your "legacy" shops you'll be using frameworks that incorporated the best of those ShinyNewThings. Or do people really think the Java ecosystem today (or the .NET ecosystem, etc) hasn't changed over that time. And that's okay. It's okay to wait until it matured. What isn't okay is that it's usually coached in derisive, defensive terminology that denigrates whatever is "Trendy". That part isn't cool
    • jskaggz 7y ago
      In your last sentence, the converse also applies to would be trendsetters denigrating mature technologies. I think that the key problem is that people in this industry are quick to play the denigration card in order to justify their own beliefs, instead of fostering an environment of mutual respect. Remember, a lot of the audience of hackernews, for better or for worse, are impressionable green management that aren't exactly qualified to start powering their homes with miniaturized fusion reactors, and would be better off to keep using things like relational databases and cobol if the ends justify the means. Does this problem play out in respect to experimental medicine I wonder? j2ee+oracle == aspirin? isomorphic reactjs+node == S100A9 vaccine?
• exlurker 7y ago
  Hehe... Cool, I'm a "dark matter developer" and I like it. Edit: Because of downvotes, I'll expand a bit for more interesting comment. I work in a pretty large corp. as a developer, and solve a lot of smaller day-to-day business problems - let's say it begins with Excel and ends with a web form. I also set up the server, database and anything else I need on Azure in co-operation with our (very big) IT provider. I find it quite interesting, but my workday ends at 16.
• exabrial 7y ago
  > IT Runs on Java 8 in Go
• villgax 7y ago
  Dunno what hole she is in but Excel, Sharepoint are all things that new age companies don't work on & rather is the tool of choice for all things by legacy ones still chugging along.
  • Sharlin 7y ago
    "Legacy ones" as in almost all companies. The fact is that the economy, in large part, runs on Excel.
    • wglb 7y ago
      And in addition, Visual Basic. Oh, don't forget COBOL.
      • syockit 7y ago
        The part when they said they spent a lot of money to port to C/C++ but couldn't get same efficiency/speed, that's the problem with most porting endeavours: you need people who grok both languages you're porting from and you're porting to, or at least understand the specs and business logic. That COBOL program has probably been optimised so much that the code makes no sense to people without understanding of the intricacies of that language. My team spent a whole quarter on converting R code into Python, because we wanted to use Tensorflow for machine learning(). When they finally got the thing running, they found out it wasn't performing as fast as R. I thought, that couldn't be possible, they use pretty much the same linear algebra libraries. So I peeked into the code to see what went wrong and found out that they writing it the wrong way: (1) calculated on Pandas dataframe directly instead of extracting the values first when doing matrix calculation, (2) instead of plain ndarray, were using matrix instead, which is slower. Both of which someone without experience in Python wouldn't have known. () On a hindsight, did it have to be Tensorflow? Besides, there's already an interface for R[1]. Maybe the team decided on Python anyway in case they want to try out the plethora of ML libraries available for that language. [1] https://tensorflow.rstudio.com/ https://tensorflow.rstudio.com/
        • 7y ago
• inertiatic 7y ago
  It's a bit disturbing how much people in this industry are focused on tooling. It's a biproduct IMO of working on boring problems or supporting morally ambiguous corps. That thing that you need to keep yourself busy and keep going in the rat race.
  • gambler 7y ago
    Tooling is great for job security. You can be absolutely shit at writing code and designing systems, yet make yourself indispensable because you know Framework X and most other people don't. All it takes is time to memorize trivia of the framework and a bit of trial-and-error to figure out how to work around framework's pitfalls. Unfortunately, this creates a whole host of long-term issues. For example, it create the situation where complex tools have their fervent advocates, while simple tools do not (because they don't provide job security). It also create an incentive to start a sort of complexity Ponzi scheme: you add tools to manage tools to manage other tools and so on. Each new layer reinforces the job security of people working on the previous one. It's important to keep in mind that stuff like Java 8 and C are also tools, susceptible to the same problem.
    • VBprogrammer 7y ago
      > you add tools to manage tools to manage other tools and so on. Each new layer reinforces the job security of people working on the previous one. The first time I seen a job title of "Kubernetes Keeper" I died a little inside. It's not that these jobs didn't exist before, and sysadmin is a perfectly good role which I personally don't have the skills or desire to do, but we keep pretending that we've build a way of replacing some of the effort which just moves it around a little.
      • xfer 7y ago
        Yeah it's much better to list a dozen tools/frameworks that you must be expert at than just making it clear about the current requirements.
  • username223 7y ago
• Zrdr 7y ago
  Effectively, HN has a strong bias over interesting things.
• guitarbill 7y ago
  Blindness to "old", established tools and technologies is one thing, but let's not pretend Sharepoint, Java 8, Excel, et al don't have their fair amount of suckiness and operational challenges.
  • 4ndrewl 7y ago
    Is anyone pretending that?
• Sharlin 7y ago
  I mean, Java 8, that's great! From an enterprise point of view it was released basically yesterday. I'm sure a large minority of systems still runs on Java 5 or 6.
  • vbezhenar 7y ago
    There's very little reason not to upgrade to Java 8. Generally things just work. With Java 11 generally things just break, so it's completely another matter. I think that Java 8/11 will repeat Python 2/3 story.
    • nunobrito 7y ago
      We are moving to Java 8. There is a special place in my heart to hate the new shiny lambdas. Makes code too difficult for reading, nowhere compatible when needing to use Java 7 every now and then. With the article would just disagree on Sharepoint, would say Confluence has finally replaced that one.
      • justjash 7y ago
        Yeah, I agree as far as reading it goes when you switch between different projects using different versions. I do like using the Stream API though.
      • sunaurus 7y ago
        I'm curious, do you really prefer anonymous classes over lambdas? To me, anonymous classes are much more annoying to read. Or are you just saying that lambdas are as bad as anonymous classes?
        • seeekr 7y ago
          IntelliJ IDEA actually just collapses them into lambdas by default. And it also auto-generates them for you so you don't have to type them. At least that was the state of things a couple of years ago, can only have gotten even better since then.
      • 7y ago
• sdegutis 7y ago
  > This piece of the puzzle is the one that worries me the most. What I’m worried about is that places like Hacker News, r/programming, the tech press, and conferences expose us to a number of tech-forward biases about our industry that are overenthusiastic about the promises of new technology without talking about tradeoffs. That's because these are marketing websites, meant to show off the newest and shiniest things, with an agenda. We like them because by our nature we like new and shiny things, but their content isn't representative of real life, like at all. > That the loudest voices get the most credibility, and, that, as a result, we are listening to complicated set-ups and overengineering systems of distributed networking and queues and serverless and microservices and machine learning platforms that our companies don’t need, and that most other developers that pick up our work can’t relate to, or can even work with. This is also part of human nature and my experience in the tech world confirms to me that the loudest voices are usually somewhere in the top of the bell curve of correctness or usefulness. Make friends with people who are working on real products every day and stay grounded in reality by talking to them, like knives that sharpen each other. The less they want to talk about tech or share their opinions, the more likely they are to have sane, reasonable and useful ones.
• vbezhenar 7y ago
  I'm right now writing code for integration with one information system using SOAP Web Service with digital signatures. Good old Java 8, wsimport, etc. Nothing wrong about it, it gets job done. I'm still reluctant to throw away XML from my Spring projects, I don't like their new approach with annotations and XML works better for me.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• nileshk 7y ago
  At work, we have some customers who want to use WebLogic and Websphere, and last time I checked those don't have versions that support anything beyond Java 8. I still use Java 8 even on personal projects. I'm migrating those to Kotlin, so I'm at least not held back with regard to programming language features. I could upgrade those to Java 11 (or 12), just haven't prioritized taking the time to do that over other tasks, and the benefit would be minimal for these particular projects. When using Java 8 language, I'm just happy to have lambdas and streams. Java 8 was the biggest improvement to Java language since 5 -- and I'd say it's a bigger leap that 5 was.
  • sanxiyn 7y ago
    I disagree. Addition of generics in Java 5 was bigger.
    • barrkel 7y ago
      I'd rather keep lambdas and live with runtime polymorphism, than keep parametric polymorphism and lose lambdas. Generics, in terms of scope, is a bigger feature, for sure. And generics make lambdas more usable. But the distance between generics and their alternative - manual casts throughout - is larger than the distance between lambdas and anonymous inner classes.
      • usrusr 7y ago
        Lambdas on untyped streams? I think I'll pass... Speaking of dark matter coding, story time: a spare time project of mine involves bringing an actual, pre-generics codebase into the not quite as distant past. That beast still has real, living users! Surprisingly, a frequent complaint is running out of heap memory, so they are happily sharing their magic -Xmx incantations with values that would have been outrageously high when the code was written.
  • klodolph 7y ago
    I don't use Java at work, but at home I inevitably install it for some kind of tooling. Always Java 8. I've accidentally installed Java 9 or newer a couple times and always ended up with something broken.
• diminish 7y ago
  Maybe it's wrong to see startup tech as the cutting edge part of the IT. IT maybe just another industry similar to bio or agriculture and not part of the startup tech. Maybe IT crowd should simply avoid sharing common forums like HN with startup and SV people.
  • dang 7y ago
    I hope not! HN is for everybody who is intellectually curious.
• Tade0 7y ago
  I’ve developed in environments where Java 8 was still the latest available version because of upgrade security issues. I have a friend who, until very recently, was working on a system based on Java 6, which coincidentally was the latest version back when the both of us were in college. I'm currently in a not-that-old project(2 years old) the front-end of which was built using Angular 1.x. I have to admit I like this, because my biggest gripe with this framework was that the API changes from version to version were so intense, that you couldn't find a working tutorial for some stuff. Now that it's not being updated that fast it's much easier.
• mzkply 7y ago
  The HN front page is similar to any community. For example, a car site's homepage will be listing the latest supercars, expensive turbos, rims, whatever... while most readers are driving a $30,000 Civic. The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.
  • dang 7y ago
    Good point about communities, but I don't think it's good to say "the best and brightest in tech" in this context. HN exists to gratify curiosity, and people are more curious about things they haven't seen before, or that are currently captivating their imagination. This emotion is not a reflection of the world around us—it's aspirational. But there's a risk if we start to feel inferior because we don't get to do that at our job or whatever, which is partly what the article is about. Incidentally, it's the same curiosity that has the current article near the top of HN right now. It's not a point that has been articulated so often, or so recently, or so well, so it's fresh. Even if we already know it, it's a fresh reminder. (And also, of course, there's the catnip of the meta dimension.)
  • geofft 7y ago
    > The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems I don't think that's true—there is a subset of the best and brightest who work on greenfield projects very decoupled from existing customer bases, and they get to blog / present / post a lot about what they're doing. There are quite a few "best and brightest" people who are in large companies or slow-moving industries. They're often constrained to existing tooling, because moving to fancy new tooling is a huge risk and time sink for limited reward. They might be using cool personal tools—fancy editors and keyboards and window managers—but the stack they work on is generally "legacy". And usually the problem of "How do we make this work slightly better for millions of end users" ends up being a bigger problem than "How do we do something really cool as a demo."
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      If they're really the best, wouldn't they have their pick of workplaces and optimize for personal enjoyment? Nobody who could chew through research level algorithm problems all day would willingly write Java 8 CRUD apps for Windows Server 2000, because those are the people that have a choice.
• dcole2929 7y ago
  In the majority of companies it's simply not possible to operate on the bleeding edge the way HN articles would have you believe you should. Besides the obvious issues around the value of rewriting stable legacy systems on new platforms, there are also man power issues. You need tier 1 developers to live on the bleeding edge because any problem that comes up (and they will come up) largely requires you to solve it yourself sans the help of the greater internet. On a legacy system an average dev can generally Google any issues that arise because they are known problems. When dealing with new tech it's a lot more likely to be the first person to run into some obscure use case no one has ever experienced before. And in that case you need devs who are not only capable but willing to invest in solving the problem. Sometimes that means, re-architect something in the stack and sometimes it may even require making a PR to the original project. That's a lot of investment that may make your devs happier but probably provides little concrete value to the business. That said I'm still building on elixir so what do I know.
  • wildermuthn 7y ago
    Good points here. Which is why HN is oriented toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. PG and his cofounders invented the web app, using a combination of old tech (lisp) and new (the internet). There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem. “How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter. Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      Hacker News ranks at #959 in the US. It didn’t get that rank from just being geared toward startups with Tier 1 engineers. Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general. HN’s front page 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10 HN’s front page 5 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-05-10
• mnorton 7y ago
  this should be like, pinned, to the top of HN
  • idlewords 7y ago
    Just replace HN with this static file.
• lanius 7y ago
  Is the story about Tesla's infrastructure true? I seem to remember it was posted before, and the consensus then was that it was a great work of fiction.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  HN is basically Reddit for tech founders, so it tends to skew toward hype. And it's a small place, which makes for great echo chambers. Anything that makes it to the front page without being killed by admins, bots or users will probably be over-hyped. Wrt over-using new tech: I've mostly seen this with hype directed at C-levels. Maybe one or two people on a team will pick up Rust or Go because they saw it on HN, but a year-plus slog will be initiated to implement a single Kubernetes platform that everyone must use, because a jagoff in a suit read a Wired article that said Kubernetes is the future of the internets. (Meanwhile, most of the devs don't use containers, pipelines are stood up in one-off Jenkins on shitty infra, the new "microservices" are really "distributed monoliths", and the security team is a guy nobody knows whose main occupation is writing drafts of best practices that nobody reads) I think this will continue as long as we build tech by winging it, rather than doing case studies, analyzing solutions, and setting industry standards. And I'd argue another problem is cobbling together our own tools rather than paying for well-made ones. Because we're so interested in either getting things for free or writing them ourselves, really solid tools are rare.
  • UglyToad 7y ago
    This touches on something I've been thinking about a bit recently. It seems like software is undergoing a crisis of delivery, though I doubt that's new it still feels like there has not been much progress in delivering software that matters where it's needed. I'm thinking specifically about the Crossrail project here in the UK where signalling has completely screwed the project https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/18/crossrail-opening-may-be-delayed-to-2021 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/201... Of course such systems tend not to be taking advantage of the newest tech but it feels like there's a lot of talk about how to achieve Netflix scale for simple websites with a few 100,000s of users and not much progress on delivering tangible, socially useful, software. Maybe it's selection bias and Rust is perhaps promising in this space but a lot of hyped technologies feel ephemeral or not useful outside of Web.
• tetha 7y ago
  Incremental improvements to an infrastructure or rather the software ecosystem of a company isn't something many people talk about, indeed. Shiny new tools are interesting and flashy to look at. For example, I'm very happy with the development of the company I work for over the last 2 or 3 years. I've pushed them from old unmanaged systems to mutable systems managed through chef. There's still some really ugly things, it's mutable, it's not shiny, it's VMs running tomcat running java 8. I like to call it really 2000s and/or vintage. It took time to migrate all systems, to gain trust of stake holders, to educate and convince the ops team. And I guess in some cases, we're running a really ugly mess of a system, but it's a reproducible mess. But this was a massive improvement and value gain for the company. Suddenly we have an ops team with a lot of leverage and competence to manage an ever growing SaaS setup. And overall, the mindset of most people involved has changed over time towards standards, automation and the value of this. Automation has improved the cost efficiency of some default projects dramatically. We're still old school overall, but we're generating value. And now the wheel of time has turned some. We've been bought, now there's 8 more development teams, now there's new products being brought in. At this point we're picking up containers at a larger scale because we have to move faster than the config management can handle with the current manpower. So now we're handling some stuff we can using the config management, some stuff with containers. Overall, moving slow and deliberately in an infrastructure is a very valuable skill. Solve the important problems. Sometimes a trusty, ugly, old java application server isn't your important problem.
• draw_down 7y ago
  Sure, it's true that you can get work by learning "unsexy" stuff. If you want literally just a job, any job, knock yourself out I guess. Better questions to ask: Is it good work? Will you find it fulfilling? Will they treat you well or will they treat you like a cost center? Sure, 80% of places don't use whatever newfangled tech you care to name, but that's not the whole picture. 80% of places are probably places you don't want to work, so what good is it to say "80% of places <literally anything goes here>"? You don't care about the majority of places, you care about the ones you would actually want to work at. What do people in those places do? The point I'm driving at is not exactly that you should learn new stuff to work in a good place. Rather, the more options you have, the better chance you have at getting into a line of work you actually want to be in. And sure, it is possible that you will end up using Java in that line of work. There are reasons people use newer tech. And not all of those reasons have to do with being addled by ADHD and obsessed with shiny things. I get tired of that implication. Remember that Java 8 (or whatever tech you care to name) was once upon a time the new shiny stuff.
• usermac 7y ago
  That was an enjoyable read. Just funny. Alright, I might not be a "dark" employee but we do run our shop on... FileMaker! Since 1993 as best I can tell.
  • Veen 7y ago
    I had no idea FileMaker was still around. Thirty-four years old and still being developed and used. Seems out-of-character for Apple to keep it going.
    • usermac 7y ago
      It's pretty sweet. I just fielded a full online order system and did it in 30 calendar days flat. It wins five-star reviews from my users and raving compliments.
    • usermac 7y ago
      Now that you put it that way, I am a "dark" employee. ha ha
• matrix 7y ago
  I think the author might not realize the substantial difference between working in a tech company (the HN audience) and in supporting roles in non-tech businesses. I have worked in both worlds, and it really just comes down to choosing the right tools for the job. In tech you're supposed to be on the cutting edge. That's part of what makes it fun and rewarding. However, if anybody feels lesser for working in non-tech they're probably thinking the wrong way about the value they're creating. It can be immensely rewarding to build something unsexy and relatively simple that moves the needle by millions or even billions of dollars.
  • pandalicious 7y ago
    I think you're overestimating how much development at tech companies is done using newer languages. Java is the dominant language at both Amazon and Google.
  • lwb 7y ago
    > I think the author might not realize the substantial difference between working in a tech company (the HN audience) and in supporting roles in non-tech businesses. I too underestimated this -- a tech internship at ExxonMobil was such a vastly different experience from a tech internship at Facebook that they could barely both be considered the same field.
  • sound1 7y ago
    Yep, if your company's core business is not tech, be prepared to work on shitload of legacy and outdated technologies.
  • thrower123 7y ago
    The biggest tech companies in the world run on mountains of C and Obj-C code that are old enough to buy a beer or rent a car without paying extra. The thing about the bleeding edge is it's too easy to cut yourself and bleed out. I see lots of people bogging theselves down in the details of their sexy new framework, without understanding the principles of what it is doing - which is rarely different than using cool new thing n-1 or n-2 correctly.
• z3phyr 7y ago
  I would argue that Hacker News is actually not about the latest in cutting edge technology. Rather, it derives more from the spirit of hacking, fundamentally making computers do something other people thought are not possible to do or never tried. It looks like the latest cutting edge tech but rather its a bunch of people just experimenting. It does not show whats the norm, but what is possible.
  • ausbah 7y ago
    But when does hacking just become needlessly reinventing the wheel
  • iamatworknow 7y ago
    That would be cool if that's how things worked, but it seems like nearly every post here (certainly most comments) aren't considering the shiny new tools in that context. Rather, most comments are in the vein of "this seems fun to play with, may have marginal benefit in x business scenario, how do I convince my bosses to let me spend resources implementing it?"
• ar_lan 7y ago
  I don't know why, but Scott's comments in here came off pretty condescending. If you're a developer on Twitter, it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing that the only developers that matter are front-end engineers. Just because helping develop the kernel, or integrating a new product on an already existing, proven stack that runs Angular for the front and Spring in the back, does not provide shiny things to look at doesn't make them less important, and it really comes off as if he's saying the "famous developers" should feel bad about that. I don't know, maybe it just rubbed me the wrong way.
  • thrower123 7y ago
    Sometimes it can be mind-blowing the lengths front-end devs will go to avoid writing a little html file with self-contained script tags for a one-off throwaway page.
• S_A_P 7y ago
  Salient points, but even Java is a regional thing. In Texas, if you aren't using .NET then you are in the minority.
• phoe-krk 7y ago
  Sure it runs on Java 8. Some companies prefer stable and battle-tested software and languages over whatever is currently The Hype™.
  • xxs 7y ago
    Java usually offer one of the easier paths to find decent developers.
• sarcasmic 7y ago
  Much of the ahead-of-the-curve, aspirational tech stack posts featured on HN are the blogging equivalent of Instagram-polished shots. On a personal blog they're equal parts self-expression and self-promotion; on a company blog they're equal parts deep dive and recruitment teaser. It's okay. Some readers will feel intrigue, some confusion, some envy. They'll wonder why they can't use those new tools at their work. It's nice to recognize there exist developers who seem to stand apart from the vocal ones who make these posts, but they're not a single class. Some brag just as much, just in different circles. Some don't brag, but they do lots of good work. Some put out work that's not so good, and they may or may seek to represent their accomplishment regardless. The only factor they clearly share is their underrepresentation and their lack of attained popularity in talking about their work on social media. As tempting as it may be, it's a big reach to conclude due to their underrepresentation that their tech stacks are conservative, or even dated; it's not a given that their work is solid and they're hard at work solving business problems given numerous constraints and office politics. Efforts to define this population by their rejection of shiny hype just perpetuates a kind of fictitious class divide between "fancy" developers and "plain" developers, when the real class divide is between management that is desperate for results, and IT workers that are desperate for empowered decision-making and resources. Businesses are under tremendous pressure, and silver bullets read about elsewhere carry great appeal. Transplanted organically by enthusiastic developers or by order of management, such solutions rarely work, because changing just a few inputs of a complex process won't deterministically give a better result. And mediocre results of a messy process make for a different genre of writing. Maybe there's a class divide after all: between developers who are privileged enough to cook up all sorts of clever, custom solutions to challenging problems and can write about it, and those who spend their whole workday surviving the onslaught of nonsensical demands and deliver something mostly working in the end.
• lucdurette 7y ago
  Great post
• jonenst 7y ago
  Using java8 in 2019 is pretty normal. It's "only" 6 years old (released at the beginning of 2014), nothing like the cobol horror stories. The 6 years old java is not very different from what software you get from debian stable. The next lts java11 was released at the end of 2018 and does break some things so you need time to update. It was supported by oracle until Jan 2019, while other vendors have pledged support until 2023 and more. And most importantly java8 is still a decent experience.
  • sound1 7y ago
    what cobol horror stories?
• snlacks 7y ago
  Devs using the newest tech at start-ups, hobbies, and in their side work leads to the menegerie of today's Node Microservices Containers (or whatever) becoming tomorrow's Java 8 on Windows 2012. Interestingly, I work at a medium sized company that is updating existing tech to microservices and the cloud because 5 years later, it seems like those are good investments that return good value in ease of configuration, deployment, etc.
• X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
  I work at a company that employs +1.5k engineers that is currently stuck on guava 16 (released in 2014) and upgraded to java 8 about two years ago. P.S. > This is the reason many government agencies return data in PDF formats, or in XML. Equating returning data in XML to returning data in PDF is cray. I'd take XML over human readable PDF 100 times to 1.
• pron 7y ago
  The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-edge development and technological breakthroughs on these matters continues to take place in Java (disclosure: I work on OpenJDK full-time). Just in the past few years we've seen the release of open-source GCs with less than 2ms worst-case pause times on terabytes of heap (ZGC and Shenandoah), a revolution in optimizing compilers (Graal/Truffle), and there's an upcoming release to streaming access to low-overhead deep profiling (JFR). So Java is not only the safe choice for serious server-side software; it's also the bleeding edge.
  • sonnyblarney 7y ago
    This - Java 8 'feels' legacy, but in so many ways it's miles ahead of upstarts. Sometimes we forget that the JVM (almost) = Java and that thing is a beast.
  • crimsonalucard 7y ago
    True, but java carries a lot of legacy.
    • Bombthecat 7y ago
      So do the framework within Java.
    • crimsonalucard 7y ago
      Wow I'm getting voted down. I guess I should reverse what I said because it's obviously not true at all. Java carries zero legacy.
      • gerbilly 7y ago
        No, you don't need to reverse your opinion at all. Personally, I voted you down because your opinion was stated in a sort of offhanded manner that does not do the subject justice.
• hangonhn 7y ago
  But to be fair, Java 8 to Java 12 (2014 to 2019) happened a lot faster than Java 6 to Java 8 (2006 to 2014). Being on Java 8 is not a bad thing because it's actually not that old.
  • erik_seaberg 7y ago
    Java 12 won't have long-term support, so you need some compelling reason to choose it for prod. Java 11 (the next LTS release after 8) has only been out since September, and the module system (which I find pretty pointless for backend) did break some stuff, so I only feel a little bad about not being on it yet.
• jressey 7y ago
  All I know is that reading HN and responding to what I've learned has made my salary go up, up, up in the last 5 years. Partially by recognizing there are so many cool things out there that pay well. You can be defeatist and say "I'll never learn all of this,' or you can be clever and figure out the things that are worthwhile to learn. I went from working in a boring insurance shop to one of the fastest growing tech companies in America. Had I not paid attention to HN, that wouldn't have happened.
  • wikibob 7y ago
    Would love to hear more details about your story. What were you doing before exactly? What tech specifically do you feel helped you?
    • jressey 7y ago
      I was at an insurance company upgrading old systems to use less old technology. I had an information science degree and was a pretty lousy programmer. HackerNews helped to demystify working at a software company. It just seemed more and more in reach as I kept reading and contributing. The most important thing though, is it taught me to get my shit together before making a comment. That extended to being more rigorous in all the work I did, leading to success. I also came across tons of articles about how to level up, and cool resources where I could practice coding challenges. Looking back, it was like having a rich community at tech-oriented company without being able to work at a place like that. It's really hard to draw a line, but I think I just gained familiarity with the industry and learned to tell when an technology idea is bullshit or legit. All that led to more confidence and that shit is gold when it comes to leveling yourself up.
• bovermyer 7y ago
  This is my favorite quote: > For better or worse, the world still runs on Excel, Java 8, and Sharepoint, and I think it’s important for us as technology professionals to remember and be empathetic of that.
• bsaul 7y ago
  Fun story : i had to develop the same system for two different companies, one a startup with 3 employees (the founders) , the other a billion dollar business. Just a backend api & web interface, together with an iOS app displaying the content. I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me to use java and deploy the code on the big corp datacenter. The start up code was built in two months, and maintained by an intern for two years with success. It basically cost nothing to run. The big corp code was built in a year (note: i did know how to develop in java), people in charge couldn't manage to deploy it (i had to do it myself, despite just discovering their infra on the spot), and i had to maintain the code myself, because despite huge code guidelines and restrictions on the technologies allowed, nobody inside was assigned to maintaining the code. So, yeah, there's definitely a danger to absolutely wanting to follow the HN hype. But don't feel good if your company relies on 8yo tech and process. It could be loosing a TON of money by not staying up-to-date with the state of the art.
  • oaiey 7y ago
    It is not the technology which is slowing down the enterprises. That is done by processes, humans and risk. You cannot stay up to date permanently, because that introduces risks all the time. Once you earn money, there are layers to protect the money stream. You can loose tons of money by not staying modern, that is true. But you can loose everything when you ignore a risk. The trick is to find a balance. And all of that is not considering investors and their idea how the money should be used.
    • aa2858 7y ago
      You nailed this and this is very thoughtful.
    • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      You can't avoid upgrading forever though, eventually your legacy technology will stop getting security updates and support. Then you are tasked with a huge leap from old to new. I suspect corporates don't really want to get stuck with so much legacy, they just don't know how to avoid it.
• EugeneOZ 7y ago
  Everything is fine with HN front page - technology enthusiasts should talk about bleeding edge technologies. You expect them to discuss VB6 or Sharepoint? Well, problem is not with them. If you don't learn new things your skills will be outdated soon - world is moving forward, technologies are running forward. You shouldn't rewrite everything with new tool/language, but you should constantly read what new techs are around, what is interesting or useful for your business or just you personally.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• johnjreiser 7y ago
  Isn't this what Bimodal IT strategy all about? You'd want to keep current with cutting edge (through sites like this one) so you know which future looks promising and then incorporate the changes into your organization's systems when the time is right. I enjoyed the article and too have felt the urge to think "why aren't we doing that?" but the business still needs to happen while you're also experimenting with tensorflow emoji recognition.
• cbsmith 7y ago
  What's funny about this is that Java 8 is no longer supported by Oracle, so unless you are using openjdk or some other equivalent, IT is running on a potentially insecure platform. Not being cutting edge is one thing, but being insecure...
  • ciceryadam 7y ago
    There is no longer free Oracle support for Java 8. But Amazon's James Gosling lead Corretto is reviewing updates, and even backports: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/patches.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/pa...
    • cbsmith 7y ago
      That's if you are using Corretto, not Oracle's JDK.
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 7y ago
    Large companies have support deals with Oracle (or other providers, like Red Hat, IBM or Azul). My client has one for Java 8 until 2026 I think. One of the larger obstacles in upgrading to Java 11 is that the libraries which replace SOAP clients in JDK are not patched (unlike the JDK), and have a ton of known CVEs to them.
    • cbsmith 7y ago
      Those are probably all the companies using Java 8 right? ;-)
• djhworld 7y ago
  I think the stuff that surfaces on places like HN is mostly out of the ordinary. I've worked in enterprise shops churning out staid Java code on weblogic servers in the past, if anything HN was kind of an escape hatch for me to see what else is going on in the tech world, even if sometimes it's driven by fads. Most enterprise software engineering is either very complex due to over engineering, complex business rules or organisational structure or very mundane CRUD development. Not to say it isn't challenging because often it is, with the usual scaling, managing data models problems that need to meet the needs of the corporate hierarchy, but a lot of it is very bespoke. The only commonality is maybe the frameworks and tooling (C#, Java, Spring etc) and maybe some industry level patterns that map to business processes (shopping carts, reporting systems, invoice processing etc) but the web has endless resources around these that take a while to dig through but usually you find something to solve your problem.
• caust1c 7y ago
  Great commentary, but I disagree with this point: > we are listening to complicated set-ups and overengineering systems of distributed networking and queues and serverless and microservices and machine learning platforms that our companies don’t need A lot of these technologies are talked about not because they're cool or hip, but because they actually increase productivity quite significantly. You can build complex architectures with any stack. But what many new technologies enable is building a company with fewer engineers and fewer resources than what was required before. That said: it's clearly possible to be very productive with old technologies as well. However, I just don't see new companies which need to interact with "legacy" software being run without using some sort of virtualization or containerization technology.
• cbdumas 7y ago
  I went from a software dev role at a B2B SaaS company to a consulting role about a year and a half ago. It has been eye opening to say the least. One of my first projects was helping a Fortune 500 company run analytics on AWS with data sourced from their Db2 mainframe, which had been in production for multiple decades. Most clients are very uncomfortable with Linux, and Microsoft stack is definitely the default. IT usually keeps the corporate network and individual workstations under VERY strict control, so getting new tech onboarded or new processes implemented can be a multi-week territorial battle. It truly is a different world at most places. ETA: I forgot to mention that things at FAANG companies may not be as different as you think. I am currently working with a business team at one which is using a few tools based entirely on Excel and VBA.
• dr01d 7y ago
  Oracle
• dbrgn 7y ago
  I work on an Android codebase. I wish I could use all of Java 8...
• sunaurus 7y ago
  >Java 8 is still the dominant development environment, according to the JVM ecosystem report of 2018. >If you think that’s bad... Why would I think that's bad? The replacement for Java 8 was just recently released, does anybody really expect the world to upgrade so quickly?
  • Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Seriously. The replacement is maybe 6 months old and breaks a lot of things— the Java code I work on doesn't work with Java 11. While we can (and at some point will) figure out why and fix it, there's other things to do in the meantime. And just migrating from Oracle JDK to OpenJDK has been enough of a pain in the ass.
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 7y ago
      I'm currently searching for a replacement JAX-WS implementation so that we can migrate to Java 11, and so far I haven't been able to find one without old-ass CVEs which were patched in core Java.
• cutler 7y ago
  According to https://builtwith.com https://builtwith.com most of the world's top websites are built with PHP or ASP.Net, ie. pretty old technologies, yet all we hear about in the tech press and job boards is React.js and Node.
• djabatt 7y ago
  HN news is about possibility, inspiration and also practical/tactical insights. Writing about the past and the maintenance of the old systems isn't all that interesting. Thus most don't want to write or read about. We all agree there are many old and once very cool tech in the wild, but I for one use HN to be inspired and jazzed about what the community on edge is doing or wanting to do. :)
• cptwunderlich 7y ago
  Java 8? I wish! We're mostly stuck with Java 6 and 7! :(
• abalone 7y ago
  See also: “Why NASA’s newest space shuttle uses a computer chip from 2002” https://qz.com/317406/why-nasas-newest-space-shuttle-uses-a-computer-chip-from-2002/ https://qz.com/317406/why-nasas-newest-space-shuttle-uses-a-...
• vijaybritto 7y ago
  I was on the hype train for quite a while jumping between different systems and burning out a lot. It's mainly because I entered web dev when javascript was beginning to eat up the world. Its the only language I know and understand well. (learning Rust and dart now) Lots and lots of ideas and frameworks keep coming up. Now when i read stuff for the backend its pretty calm and steady. Especially in the java stack. I used to laugh at people writing java. I complained that JVM takes a lot of memory. But I didn't see that JVM still completed >98% of the requests whereas my Node app was completing only around 65% of them. The memory mattered in my laptop but not in the server. Now we rapidly prototype features in Node and move them to java once the consumers like those features. Even though the stability of an application depends on the programmers, its a good decision to use well tested and stable stacks.
• ltr_ 7y ago
  > I’ve finally come to realize that most businesss and developers simply don’t revolve around whatever’s trending on HN. shocking. but truth be told,HN have a share on my hate to any IT job in my country, and my past professional decisions.
• faustocarva 7y ago
  Perfect!
• electrotype 7y ago
  At one point, you have to stop "looking for the next magical/better thing". You pick something mature enough, that works well, and you ignore new cool trends (anyway there will be cooler things soon enough). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc What I am trying to do with my framework, https://www.spincast.org https://www.spincast.org , is to ignore new cool trends as much as possible and focus on real use cases. Comments welcome.
• myrandomcomment 7y ago
  I love it because it is so true. I live in the bubble of the valley and I cannot even begin to recount the number of arguments I have had with people about why an big enterprise just cannot do/move/etc. to X.
• gigatexal 7y ago
  Java 8? That’s great! It’s got streams and was fun to learn. Anything older than that would be rough. We’ve still got code that runs on node 1.x so java 8 is awesome.
• outworlder 7y ago
  > And what Hacker News was teaching me was that the entire IT industry was working on brand-new Macbooks, using Go and Rust, Docker and CI, to build amazing products. The problem is, some companies are using Go and Rust, K8s, Docker in brand new Macbooks. They are not the majority, but they are there. You may care about these things, or you may not. But if you do, working on a "normal" company is infuriating. I had to use CVS while using Git for my personal projects... Now I am typing this on a Macbook (although not brand new) and deploying Go microservices in K8s. The thing to keep in mind is that companies are schizophrenic. In another corner of the same company, there are people arguing against Lua for an embedded system because "no one uses it in production"... So go find the corner that makes you happy.
  • philwelch 7y ago
    The converse problem is that some companies end up building or rebuilding everything the most resume-driven way possible and then run headfirst into tooling and frameworks that are either unnecessary to their actual requirements, not mature enough, or was just a dumb fad all along. The actual developers get to put stuff on their resumes and leave for a new company after two years and their replacements end up wanting to rewrite their "legacy codebase" in the newest fashions, and the cycle continues. I don't know what the solution is, other than just exercising good technical judgment.
• jum4 7y ago
  I have seen some Excel files from end users which grows into a whole application. The users wanted more functionalty and didn't get through all the management levels to reach someone from corporate IT and just start doing it by themselve with the tools they know and develop from Excel to Macros to VBA to VBA with SQL Database (because they have a standard process in the company to request a new SQL Database and the data was to big to be just in the Excel file directly). And then the company have this whole mess of "application" which is already business cricitcal because a lot of other users just use it as the fastet way to get their job done and the person who develop it is the only one which someone knows to handle it and maintain the application. At some point in time the original person isn't available anymore and whole setup will have troubles because of upgrades of the basis (e.g. Excel) or just performance problems. They are even consulting companies specialize in optimizing or migrate to new Excel version for such kind of applications. The corporate IT have to pick up the users early to help them to solve their current problem or help them to be more efficient with IT. If nobody helps they will develop their own solution which the knowledge/tools the have.
  • jeena 7y ago
    I think you misunderstood something here, corporate IT's main purpose is to prevent people from working efficiently. https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=information+services https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=information+service...
  • wolco 7y ago
    If it reaches that point it becomes an enterprise project with a budget and resources/time. If you try to kill every excel sheet in the wild you take on those projects without the resources to support them. Any earlier commenter said Enterprise values process over outcome. It is true at the macro level but at the micro level bosses need to make decisions or your new work will receive no credit from above and will be used against you when it fails.
  • GordonS 7y ago
    Agreed, 'shadow IT' is very real in the Enterprise. And I don't think it's the user's that are to blame - corporate IT departments just make everything so bureaucratic, expensive and difficult. Meeting after meeting, and all the time your department's budget is getting hammered for the hours, long before any development even starts.
• srameshc 7y ago
  It's a great argument. But at the same it is important to see where a lot of new investment is going into. Enterprise is changing too. So next 10 years will look a lot more different, is my opinion.
• ptx 7y ago
  > Java 8 is still the dominant development environment, according to the JVM ecosystem report of 2018. At the time the cited survey was conducted, Java 11 had not yet been released, so Java 8 was still the current LTS version. > There’s a lot to dislike about the [HN] commenters ... That seems uncalled for.
• jldugger 7y ago
  I'm not sure I can fully agree with the author's point. 'Don't feel bad that your company is running outdated and expensive technology with known vulnerabilities!' I'm not sure how else to read an article seeking to highlight folks running telnet and ColdFusion. Complacency here isn't serving your customer's best interests. It's absolutely the case that HN / tech social media induces FOMO and Resume Driven Development, but it's very easy become complacent if you adopt such a viewpoint.
  • edgarvaldes 7y ago
    >'Don't feel bad that your company is running outdated and expensive technology with known vulnerabilities!' I don't think that is the point of the article.
• beiller 7y ago
  We have some java 1.4 code, which is running on OC4J app server version 10.1.3 with apache tapestry version 4.1 app framework. I have to look up some official documentation on the internet archive because much of it is 404d. Can someone please top this? :)
• kilon 7y ago
  IT runs on a wide array of technologies. Desktop games and 3D graphics which the area I focus and obviously a massive part of the software market if we include consoles and mobile devices , C++ still is king. Most games nowadays use either Unity or Unreal, which is C# or C++. Java is almost completely absent apart of course from the Android. Of course native iOS is still Objective C and Swift. AI another field that interests me is dominated by Python. Also if we venture outside the commercial part around 40% of software is written in languages that you will never hear anything about them . Mainly because are small projects where using any language is not an issue. Generally a vast majority of the IT is definetly not Java but a wide group of highly popular languages mercilessly bombarded by thousands of unknown languages struggling to gain a fraction of a percentage in terms of growing their community. Essentially strength in numbers. Software is chaotic field of countless of technologies. Even something as big as Java has no hope of dominating because it’s impossible for a language to excel in billion different scenarios. So don’t worry Java won’t be conquering the Software world any time soon.
• sebazzz 7y ago
  Reminds me on the place I work. We have many projects for many clients. ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET "old" MVC. We don't have webpack, we use BundleTransformer. We don't have MongoDB, we have SQL Server and NHibernate or Entity Framework. .NET Core is not even on the calendar yet (maybe a little bit sooner now .NET framework is essentially deprecated). We use Knockout, though a replacement is being researched on. Our code is stored in SVN. We use LESS and Typescript 2.x, modern eh? If you have a single or a small number of products to maintain, because that is your core business, you can afford to upgrade and experiment, revert if necessary. But not if you have many projects, because those projects are per definition smaller. So you take smaller steps, less risky steps. You can't move that fast, it simply cannot be done unless you can create a business case for it. The real challenge is to resist, as the article states, all the new stuff you get slapped with every day. It is not harmful to say on a bit older technology, technology which may _seem_ to be of another era. It is still useful, and as long as it isn't a business risk it is often not a business case.
• dana321 7y ago
  A third of the websites run on Wordpress, its not trendy but it works and has a huge library of plugins and themes.
• Wonton56 7y ago
  There is nothing that «most people do». When will people realize this? Yes you have trends on HN that are different from trends in, say, the oil prospecting industry or something. And yet they overlap sometimes. You also have vastly different needs. Some beed to optimize for execution speed and some for development speed. Some need high parallellization some need single thread performance. Analytics demands writing code in minutes or preferably seconds while aircraft software may require years of testing for correctness. Even the level of experience will impact how well you can perform on any level with any tool. I mean stop discussing how many teeth a horse has and just count them. We should spend time defining what problems current and old tools can solve, not discussing what tools solve one problem better because no two people will ever have the same exact problem let alone have the same exact understanding of it.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• HeavyStorm 7y ago
  Actually, it runs on cobol. But whatever, self research is always amusing.
• overgard 7y ago
  I agree with a lot of what this article is saying, but here's a counterpoint: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html (Although I think you'd have to call it something different from the python paradox nowadays). I know personally I prefer working for companies that have these modern tech stacks, not because I'm a tech hipster or because I think these newer technologies are implicitly better than the old ones. Rather, I think it signals that the people there care about their profession and are interested enough to read blogs, keep up to date, etc., and those are the people I want to work with. That's not a criticism of the people that want to work with what they know and go home and not think about tech at all. Just a personal preference.
• zapzupnz 7y ago
  > IT Runs on Java 8 using Go > IT Runs on Java 8 using Rust > IT Runs on Java 8 using Tensorflow Still makes sense
• YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> Not me, but my mom's a COBOL programmer for a Fortune 50. Smart girls learn COBOL.
• betolink 7y ago
  Most of the comments here are missing the point. Very HN.
• astee 7y ago
  Hits home here. I started reading HN as a college freshman. At the time, a lot of the titles were gibberish to me. Over the next few years I sucked in articles and comments until I had (what I thought was) a pretty good mental model of the industry. Well that model was... quite a bit off. But the filter bubble has its merits. A little daily exposure to HN keeps the ideas churning when you're mostly doing mundane stuff.
• hertavein 7y ago
  http://www.jobz.pk/government-jobs/ http://www.jobz.pk/government-jobs/
• thatguy1 7y ago
  Dev1: I use java for work. Dev2: Ouch, I feel bad for you. We only do microservices in scala/kotlin/rust/go. Dev1: I think I need to look for a new job
• sinuhe69 7y ago
  I always thought it's a common sense that most of the industry is still running on legacy stuffs. I also thought it's common sense to critically examine other stories and opinions and to evaluate them in your own context before forming your judgment. But it seems it's not.
• hanse00 7y ago
  Nice article. As someone who has worked at a company that DOES operate on the bleeding edge of technology, it's also hard to go the other way. Only after applying for other jobs, have I realized that essentially none of my skills are transferrable to the majority of businesses out there.
• Annatar 7y ago
  "And, if the tech is, in fact old and outdated, and the tradeoff from replacing it is lower than the tradeoff of keeping it, we shouldn’t be jumping to replace it with the latest and greatest. While we should evaluate new tools evenhandedly, most times, Postgres works just fine." Bravo! Buzzword fanboy club here on "Hacker" "News" please take notice: outside of this massively biased webshit / GNU/Linux / GPL / Rust / JavaScript echo chamber, "Hacker" "News" is the butt of jokes. Try to guess why.
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  HN is biased towards startups. Startups are mostly very short lived operations. The lucky ones end up re-implementing their core technology several times. That stimulates a pattern of behavior where people emphasize engineering things that differentiate their business from what others are doing. You don't build a tech startup on doing basically what companies that already exist have been doing for years. If you copy those, you'll be exactly like those and not be able to differentiate. Also, startups don't have to worry about supporting still relevant software that they inherited from way back. I't s a clean slate by definition and that means picking current versions of whatever technology is relevant to you. So, this is simply a form of selection bias. It's actually interesting to see what startups are doing because many normal businesses end up cherry picking what happens there some time later; particularly when those startups survive (most of course don't). The title mentions Java 8, which is not that old yet. It was basically the current version until last year. 9 and 10 were non LTS releases with only 6 months support. v11 was only released summer last year. If you use Scala or Kotlin or most other JVM languages, v11 brings very little new to the table that actually matters. It's a very minor release unless you actually use the Java language. GraalVM, which is a popular new related technology is still stuck on v8. Personally, I'm a big Kotlin fan. It looks exactly the same on JDK 11 as it did on JDK 8 and there's no big need to update. Actually because of Android, Kotlin is still biased towards Java 7. I always look at technology platforms from a point of view of risk management. In a startup, you need to take risks but not across the board. If you go for some new funky storage layer (nosql, event stores, etc.), pair it with some new language nobody is using yet, and a bunch of frameworks that got released on github 3 weeks ago in a pre 1.0 state, then you are taking a lot of risk and the chance increases that some of it won't work out as you hope. It's fine if your startup is about that technology stack but otherwise, you may want to be more conservative and pick your risks more carefully. If, for example, you need to have some microservice with a bog standard REST API running, pick something that you are comfortable with or plan to take a calculated risk by e.g. trying out a new framework but pairing it with a DB and language you already know. If your startup is building what is a glorified web shop or something similarly mundane but necessary, there are a few good arguments for just sticking with proven technology. This is why e.g. Spring Boot is pretty popular with some startups. It's simple and new enough that you can get away with it without looking too old fashioned. And if you need to scale an engineering team around that in a hurry, it's kind of nice to have something reasonably widely used, understood, and mature. People stick with Ruby on Rails for the same reason even though lots of people now pull their nose up for stuff like that. A lot of fintech startups tend to stick with stuff like this. They'll use current versions and might bring in e.g. Scala or Clojure. But overall they are definitely biased towards using more enterprisey stuff. Funnily enough, node.js is now old enough that you see that creeping into the enterprise world as well. Personally for me that's still in the high risk category due to the high amount of changes and turnover with many npms. I have a few legacy node.js projects and updating their dependencies is an enormous PITA because basically everything breaks if you do that to a node.js project that is more than a few months old. It's like a snapshot of what was fashionable a while back. Most of my remaining Java projects on Github I update once every year or so (or whenever I need to touch them) and typically without any drama whatsoever. V7 or v8 to v11 is mostly a just bumping a few versions. Of course v11 can use them as is so there's no big need to do this. But I like to stay on top of this generally. If you run a company that still needs to exist in two years, resilience over time is a good thing.
• alkonaut 7y ago
  Yup still trying to migrate a big repo to git, and have been at it on and off for two years. Once your products have a decade or more of history and 100 man years or more of effort, they always carry a bit of momentum.
• jordanbeiber 7y ago
  Patterns and tools exist that many a company could use and benefit greatly from. A lot of this actually gets described in various HN posts (ex just today “use a pixel to log traffic and ditch google analytics.), and this is something I really enjoy about this community! There’s a lot of competent posters and as long as you’re just enough competent yourself to make the distinction of “out of my league, google scale” and “could make this thing I’m building simpler and better” all is good. The key here use whatever’s “meeting your requirements”, and after 20 years in both pure tech and enterprise IT let me tell you — many “dark matter” devs could use stepping out of comfort zone and question whether there’s _simpler_ as well as _better_ ways of meeting reqs. At many places politics and culture have stood in the way, but this is slowly eroding. I personally believe this ”out of comfort zone check”, or evaluation, be done at regular intervals be it regarding infra, providers, tooling or languages and it’s patterns. It’s how you learn, and more important _unlearn_! My last few years at enterprise dev shops seem to point at “we’ve won” at the floor, when it comes to embracing open source and a sharing mindset (at least here in Sweden). For me personally — happy times! Finally I’m actually allowed to use that pqsql or open source monitoring tool, and no one raises a brow. This gives you magnificent opportunities but also an incredible amount of potential foot-guns!
• IloveHN84 7y ago
  Agree with article. Probably my company has a 95% of dark matter programmers, plus writing C++ code as C with classes and keeping Java 5 (!!!) And Java Applets still in development for customers who don't want to leave Windows XP as their desktop OS.. IT might run on Java 8 if it's lucky, but more of them are even far behind it. Imagine that Jenkins CI just last year moved to Java 8 officially as JVM requirement. A ton of products are still on Java 7. If we talk then about EE Standard, i have bad news for you
• zxcvbn4038 7y ago
  Hacker News is for the people that are leading their companies into tomorrow. Everything else is for the people settled in today or fighting to stay in yesterday.
• norswap 7y ago
  There is nothing that wrong with Java 8, honestly. Have we done better since? Debatable, but maybe. But there certainly hasn't been a quantum leap. Two step forwards and one step back, more like (and sometimes the reverse). Just the title shows you how much maturity the article can muster, and the rest doesn't really hold up better.
• coreman 7y ago
  Honestly I would choose Java and not Go, Elixir etc. if I was writing software for an insurance company or other customers that demand complex business logic.
• antoaravinth 7y ago
  This is so true that I can relate this myself and my co-workers. We work on javascript side most of the time and daily there will be set of developers talking about new bundlers, react features, hooks etc and they plan to use it in the production. The one thing I see and relate to this article is that, few team have used flow stating its a great tool for static typing in js world and now they are forced to change now to typescript. The same developers who introduced flow into the codebase, now in a position to say flow has huge drawbacks compared to typescript. Now they are moving to typescript, but who knows, typescript can change too. We never know. I always fight against these tech updates, without understanding its cost, but in most cases I fail to.
• garfieldnate 7y ago
  I don't think there's anything super surprising about running on Java 8. I would be more worried if she said Java 4! Java 11, the next long-term support release after Java 8, came out late last year, and there were a lot more breaking changes between 8 and 11 than there were between 7 and 8. I had to a lot of dependencies, especially the ones that use reflection heavily (Mockito and Lombok come to mind!). Meanwhile there are still young Java programmers who think that since 8 is the newest and sexiest thing, everything has to be written using lambdas and streams.
• mrankin 7y ago
  I was right with the author until the last line where it was suggested that I just need to live with sharepoint. :(