3 ms·

Java was heavily hyped back in the 1990s and 2000s. It's still a decent language and has a number of things to recommend it, but today we have things like Go an

by api 6y ago

Java was heavily hyped back in the 1990s and 2000s. It's still a decent language and has a number of things to recommend it, but today we have things like Go and Rust. I think it really fell out of favor due to Oracle's litigious handling of it. As soon as Oracle bought it I remember people actually cancelling Java projects and changing languages. Another problem is how complex and verbose it got. Original late-90s Java was pretty clean but eventually the ecosystem fell in love with enterprise style cruft and overengineered everything. It's less a problem with the language than the community though. Like C++, you do not have to use every pattern and language feature... but many people think you do and write ridiculously complicated verbose code.

Jaxkr 6y ago
> I think it really fell out of favor due to Oracle's litigious handling of it. Thanks for the info. Didn’t know this. I use AdoptOpenJDK and am grateful the free version is so fully featured. I’d imagine back in the day Oracle Java reigned supreme and their licensing terms were a real concern.
- api 6y ago
  I have heard about Java quite a bit more ever since Oracle lost against Google at the Supreme Court. I don't think that's a coincidence.
- twic 6y ago
  Back in the day, Java came from Sun, who were generally pretty cool about it. Oracle bought Sun in 2010, things looked okay for a year or two, then it started to get scary. The situation now is not scary: there is a community process to manage the language and library definitions, the JDK is open source, with Oracle contributing, there are other significant contributors (notably RedHat and IBM ... so now just IBM), and there are multiple freely-available high quality binary releases of the same source. It could potentially get scary again. If Oracle stop contributing to the open source JDK, and instead work on a closed-source version of their own, then it's not clear that there is enough developer power among the remaining contributors to keep things moving at a healthy speed. But then, if that happened, maybe users would abandon Java rather than pay Oracle, so it would be a suicidal move for Oracle. Or, if that happened, other contributors could step up contributions to hoover up customers from Oracle. But it's not entirely reassuring to be depending on game theory like this.
askonomm 6y ago
> today we have things like Go and Rust Except that if you actually code for money, neither of those have many jobs available. Heck, in many cities I've looked _any_ jobs available. Java is still one of the most employable tools out there simply because it has a lot of jobs. Sometimes the hype-train of HN makes me think that people here are just coding for a hobby or their own start-up and entirely forget how the real world actually works.
- api 6y ago
  HN is indeed full of startup warriors. Go and Rust are popular for new fangled stuff, but you are correct that there are a massive number of Java jobs around.

by api 6y ago

Jaxkr 6y ago

> I think it really fell out of favor due to Oracle's litigious handling of it. Thanks for the info. Didn’t know this. I use AdoptOpenJDK and am grateful the free version is so fully featured. I’d imagine back in the day Oracle Java reigned supreme and their licensing terms were a real concern.

api 6y ago
I have heard about Java quite a bit more ever since Oracle lost against Google at the Supreme Court. I don't think that's a coincidence.
twic 6y ago
Back in the day, Java came from Sun, who were generally pretty cool about it. Oracle bought Sun in 2010, things looked okay for a year or two, then it started to get scary. The situation now is not scary: there is a community process to manage the language and library definitions, the JDK is open source, with Oracle contributing, there are other significant contributors (notably RedHat and IBM ... so now just IBM), and there are multiple freely-available high quality binary releases of the same source. It could potentially get scary again. If Oracle stop contributing to the open source JDK, and instead work on a closed-source version of their own, then it's not clear that there is enough developer power among the remaining contributors to keep things moving at a healthy speed. But then, if that happened, maybe users would abandon Java rather than pay Oracle, so it would be a suicidal move for Oracle. Or, if that happened, other contributors could step up contributions to hoover up customers from Oracle. But it's not entirely reassuring to be depending on game theory like this.

askonomm 6y ago

> today we have things like Go and Rust Except that if you actually code for money, neither of those have many jobs available. Heck, in many cities I've looked _any_ jobs available. Java is still one of the most employable tools out there simply because it has a lot of jobs. Sometimes the hype-train of HN makes me think that people here are just coding for a hobby or their own start-up and entirely forget how the real world actually works.

api 6y ago
HN is indeed full of startup warriors. Go and Rust are popular for new fangled stuff, but you are correct that there are a massive number of Java jobs around.