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The long strange trip to Java (1996)
- throwaway4good 5y agoWhat's up with the title?
- throwaway4good 5y agoThe title of the article is: The Long Strange Trip to Java Not: The Slow Boat to Java
- mynameismon 5y agoSeems like a mistranslation?
- throwaway4good 5y agoMaybe the poster can explain. Some kind of joke? HN is usually square when it comes to titles ...
- dang 5y agoFixed now. Thanks.
- Naga 5y agoAs an aside, the link at the top of the article (http://www.starwave.com/people/naughton/book/ http://www.starwave.com/people/naughton/book/) interestingly enough redirects now to disney.com.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoThe Wikipedia article has the corporate history behind that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starwave
- thwawayway 5y agoIt also has some account of the pedophile who wrote this article’s conviction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Naughton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Naughton
- belter 5y agoHe was on a private Disney jet...is that were the Java Handbook link comes from?
- snowman-yelling 5y agoNo, the Disney link comes from Disney acquiring the Starwave company that Naughton was associated with. Wow on him being a pedophile though. This story got weirder and weirder.
- vilaca 5y agoI learnt Java from this book back in the 90s. I'm surprised to find that it is still on my bookshelf and not lost or damaged.
- spullara 5y agoI also read this book and it was great. Too bad he turned out to be a really bad person.
- pjmlp 5y agoAlso how Objective-C influenced Java, https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere
- uwagar 5y ago
- mushyhammer 5y agoI resent them for stealing the name of a beautiful island home to 145 million people. It’s so bad that even when you google Java while on Java island you get Oracle stuff first (in incognito). I was hoping to read about an actual boat trip to Java but I knew that on HN I’m more likely to find programming stuff. For people who are unaware of the place, I suggest googling photos of “Java nature”
- embedded 5y agoI'm sorry about that. I might have been the one who originally suggested the name "Java" inspired by the cup of Peets coffee I had in my hand at the time. To be fair it would have been Kim Polese and Patrick Naughton and James and Arthur Van Hoff who made the final decision on the name from the suggestions thrown out in that meeting. And furthermore Yahoo search was dominant then, maybe with AltaVista, and the idea of polluting the search space hadn't occurred to anyone.
- mushyhammer 5y agoAre you telling me I left a random comment about something that happened 25+ years ago and the relevant person saw it within two hours? Mind blown :o Anyway it made sense at the time, it’s just unfortunate. The only redeeming part is that in Indonesian it’s actually spelled Jawa so it doesn’t affect locals too much
- uwagar 5y agoi recall learning java real early in 1997 from a nice book by patrick naughton. i was later shocked that patrick turned out to be a pedophile.
- rhacker 5y agoI discontinued using Java about 5 years ago after using it for what seems 20 years. Everyone was sold on Java for making beautiful, very well organized code bases that are VERY easy to understand, debug, and edit. And of course run-everywhere. I know a lot of people dispute that, but it's pretty much true with some various exceptions. Sun held it's promises. It's a damn beautiful language. I stopped using it because I stopped wanting to write 10000 lines for doing simple things. I want to write less code now. I know it's not as beautiful but it's definitely easy enough to read, easy enough to debug and edit. I don't want to make a new file for every, little, thing. I just want to process some data here and make a script there and handle problems, not code. This is just my perspective.
- k__ 5y agoInteresting. From an outside perspective, I had the impression Java devs would migrate to Kotlin.
- dehrmann 5y agoKotlin is nice, but setting up the build system can be a bit clunky, stack traces aren't quite as clear, it's more of a moving target, and important things like record classes are making it into Java. I tried it, but realized the code ended up being similar, just with less boilerplate, and switched back to Java. I feel like Scala went through a similar lifecycle. It looked amazing, supported lots of coding paradigms, but had a lousy build system. Once Java added lambdas, it was good enough, and Scala wasn't worth the hassle. Also, remember Groovy?
- possiblydrunk 5y agoThank goodness for Safari's Reader View! Very much needed to enjoy this post.
- pipeline_peak 5y agoWhat’s wrong, don’t adjusting left and right as you scroll down on a black background?
- monksy 5y agoI don't understand why people still use Java these days. It feels like Java has become Spring. (Mostly producing spring developers) Alternative languages have branched off of the language and have succeeded with great buy in. (Clojure, Groovy [I think it's past it's heyday], Scala, Kotlin, etc]. However, java hasn't kept up. Yes, they copied a few nice things. However they're just surface level things. They're still encouraging people to write procedural code and worry about weird things that other frameworks take care of you. (Weird concurrency issues, DSLs, etc) What I'm talking about: - Pattern matching (this comes from scala) - They're slowly trying to give you something useful in a switch statement. It's no where near as expressive and extendable as what Scala gives you. (They went from int based, to string based, to some minor features for matching ) - Optional - this really hasn't been workable for those who are constructing functionality. It still feels like a procedural thing that is preventing you from writing if null, it doesn't avoid nesting in Java. In scala this is just apart of the flow of your code. - Records- My understanding of the introduction of this is that it was a little different from POJOs and it broke external libraries. However, this is been a need since the days before Lombok. Additionally Groovy and Scala had this support. - var.. ok nice you are now allowing for type inference.. but why not do var and val A lot of these enhancements have been bandaids on the situation.. not full lets rethink some things and make them better
- Koshkin 5y ago> why people still use Java these days Because of the Java ecosystem, e.g. https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language https://marketplace.eclipse.org/ https://marketplace.eclipse.org/ Looking at this I sometimes cannot help thinking, "One must be insane not to use Java." (I use C++.) See also, e.g. https://jackson.sh/posts/2021-04-java-underrated/ https://jackson.sh/posts/2021-04-java-underrated/ P.S. Perl's and Python's ecosystems are also great, but Java is (much) faster.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ithrow 5y ago
- LAC-Tech 5y agoThe article is well worth a read in its entirety. I'm a millennial so it's all well before "my time" but wow. Honestly - and this may sound weird - the biggest thing that struck me about this was that there were so many established respectable companies actually doing innovative stuff with operating systems and graphical environments. It feels like the gap back then between deep technical work and customers was so much smaller. Must've been an amazing time to be in the industry.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoDisclosure: I was working at First Person during this drama. I had not seen Patrick's take on that fateful budget meeting before and it was interesting to read it. My recollection of the events are somewhat different. As I recall, the business plan that was pitched suggested that the OS that was being targeted for widespread Java adoption was the Windows release code named "Chicago" (aka Windows 95). There was a widespread belief that Sun was in the process of "ceding" the workstation market to Microsoft as they couldn't afford to put Solaris on x86 without cannibalizing their own hardware business. At the time, Dave Rosenthal (a Sun Distinguished Engineer at the time) had circulated a paper that basically said, "Unless we change dramatically the desktop belongs to Windows NT." At the budget meeting (in February) Wayne put his pitch out there and Scott McNealy hit the roof (he really really disliked Microsoft). He wanted to fire whomever came up with that plan, and Wayne artfully stepped sideways and said it was all Patrick's idea[1]. The end result was that Wayne came back from that meeting, told the team that Sun was shutting down First Person at the end of the 1994 Fiscal year (June 30th, 1995) and that we should reach out to find other jobs within Sun or elsewhere because we wouldn't have our current job come July 1st. James negotiated with Sun Legal to release it "open source" so that when we were out job hunting we could point at something that others could look at to evaluate what we had been doing. They agreed and we did a really low key announcement of that in March just before the World Wide Web conference in Darmdstadt Germany. I had managed to get included in the small number of people going to that conference along with Mark Scott Johnson who was the manager at the time. The San Jose Mercury news put our "low key" release announcement on the front page of the paper. That resulted in it being picked up by a lot of press outlets who talked to local engineers who gave it glowing reviews. When I showed up at the conference there was a small vendor exhibit area where Sun was going to be showing off the brand new SparcStation 20. The sales guys were in a PANIC because everyone was asking to see "Java" and "HotJava" and they didn't have any collateral to give them or demos. I spent a long night before the exhibits opened helping them download and install Java, and did probably four or five "training" sessions where I gave the sales guys enough to talk about. Of course with that level of customer "impact" the thoughts of shutting down First Person became a memory and everyone back at HQ was maneuvering to have Java be part of their organization. It was hilarious when Bill Joy came out to congratulate us and tell us that now we knew Java was going to be successful we could put some world class people on it. I don't think he meant it the way it came out, or maybe he did, but either way it didn't have the impact he might have wanted. Patrick had already left for Starwave at that point so he didn't get to see the shift internally. It was a pretty amazing thing though. [1] Have I mentioned that the politics at Sun were pretty ruthless?
- datavirtue 5y agoNone of this would have happened in a 100% remote work setting. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore 100% remote work if you aren't doing anything important and you can't stand your team, and for those situations it is just plain human rights to enable 100% remote, but I do miss being part of a team and being in office with smart people.
- shruubi 5y agoThis was an interesting read on tech history, so much so that I googled the author to see if there was any other writings like this. Low and behold I instead found out the guy is a convicted Paedophile...