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For Java, JVM was the "platform". I still remember learning Java in university - what left an impression on me was that my first ever university homework where

For Java, JVM was the "platform". I still remember learning Java in university - what left an impression on me was that my first ever university homework where I used Java (i.e. non-trivial project) ran perfectly on first successful compilation [+]. GC is huge help, especially if you don't use smart pointers (which were far less prevalent at the time). [+] to clarify, I was a somewhat experienced programmer, this was one of the final year projects, for distributed systems or parallel computing I believe. A simple system without doubt, but still, a system not a "hello world". Something that I wouldn't have expected to work on first try, had it been written in C.

tialaramex 5y ago
Yes. I like this in Java, and in Rust, and it's annoying for me in languages like Python where you mostly don't have this. I want the compiler to tell me my program is nonsense, so then I can fix it, rather than wait until the program has done most of its work and then, oh, did you notice this needs to be an integer but you provided a string? Sorry, program crash, fix the bug and run the whole thing again. But of course although it's the default in Java, and not provided out of the box in Python, I also wrote some web framework stuff that adds these runtime errors to Java (by using Reflection to make decisions at runtime instead) and I've seen Python code with more type safety that would tell you earlier that there's a problem. So it's ultimately not only a matter of programming language although that does definitely set the tone.
native_samples 5y ago
I think platform in this argument is meant to mean something users obtain and install apps (or websites) into. The JVM is not a platform really, it's a runtime. For a while the JRE was sort of a platform because users downloaded it separately, but that hasn't been true for a long time and yet Java is still popular.

tialaramex 5y ago

Yes. I like this in Java, and in Rust, and it's annoying for me in languages like Python where you mostly don't have this. I want the compiler to tell me my program is nonsense, so then I can fix it, rather than wait until the program has done most of its work and then, oh, did you notice this needs to be an integer but you provided a string? Sorry, program crash, fix the bug and run the whole thing again. But of course although it's the default in Java, and not provided out of the box in Python, I also wrote some web framework stuff that adds these runtime errors to Java (by using Reflection to make decisions at runtime instead) and I've seen Python code with more type safety that would tell you earlier that there's a problem. So it's ultimately not only a matter of programming language although that does definitely set the tone.

native_samples 5y ago

I think platform in this argument is meant to mean something users obtain and install apps (or websites) into. The JVM is not a platform really, it's a runtime. For a while the JRE was sort of a platform because users downloaded it separately, but that hasn't been true for a long time and yet Java is still popular.