3 ms·

> It's not hard because the changes are small and gradual Size isn't the only issue. Version number of fetishism is very much a thing in large companies. Megac

by elric 6y ago

> It's not hard because the changes are small and gradual Size isn't the only issue. Version number of fetishism is very much a thing in large companies. Megacorps and banks are very slow to update. I can't tell my customers to switch to Java 15 tomorrow (or even next year). Especially after the complexity of upgrades to 9 and 11, both of which broke things in many subtle ways. This may not be an issue for many applications, but it was certainly an issue for us and our customers.

pron 6y ago
9 was the last major release ever, and it was a big one at that (bigger than 8). And since most people skipped both 9 and 10, there was even more work. If you use the current version, all that will never ever be necessary again. If you don't, this will happen over and over, and worse: because OpenJDK's development ignores vendor's LTS services, things can disappear between one of the versions with LTS and another without warning. Because your customers don't educate themselves they're condemning themselves to an eternity of pain (paid support, higher upgrade effort, more hardware) when salvation is already here (free support [1], lower overall upgrade effort than ever in Java's history, plus always enjoying the hardware savings). I admit that doing away with major releases, giving the feature releases new version names, and the last ever major release was too much all at the same time and is confusing. But the payoff in learning what actually happened is big, as is the loss in not. Your customers might be losing both time-to-market and serious money for a lack of a day's worth of education. They can start here: https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/update-and-faq-on-the-java-se-release-cadence https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/update-and-faq-... [1]: The only version for which you get free support from anyone is the current version. No one offers free LTS for old versions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487298

by elric 6y ago

pron 6y ago

9 was the last major release ever, and it was a big one at that (bigger than 8). And since most people skipped both 9 and 10, there was even more work. If you use the current version, all that will never ever be necessary again. If you don't, this will happen over and over, and worse: because OpenJDK's development ignores vendor's LTS services, things can disappear between one of the versions with LTS and another without warning. Because your customers don't educate themselves they're condemning themselves to an eternity of pain (paid support, higher upgrade effort, more hardware) when salvation is already here (free support [1], lower overall upgrade effort than ever in Java's history, plus always enjoying the hardware savings). I admit that doing away with major releases, giving the feature releases new version names, and the last ever major release was too much all at the same time and is confusing. But the payoff in learning what actually happened is big, as is the loss in not. Your customers might be losing both time-to-market and serious money for a lack of a day's worth of education. They can start here: https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/update-and-faq-on-the-java-se-release-cadence https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/update-and-faq-... [1]: The only version for which you get free support from anyone is the current version. No one offers free LTS for old versions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487298