7 ms·

I hope hindsight is 20/20 for everyone else. Java has delivered like crazy on a lot of promises that were widely considered hot air at the time.

PaulHoule 4y ago
I was coding in Java before it reached 1.0. I remember getting into an argument with two guys in the men's room in Center Ithaca circa 1995, they thought Java was overhyped, I thought it was going to to be big. I was right, with the caveat that the original "applet" use case where you wrote little GUI apps to run in a rectangle in a web browser turned out to be a complete wash.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  not a lot of java's original goal succeeded, applet died, desktop died .. for some reason it matched well with enterprise in a time where heavy would sell in big companies in a funny way, the jvm hitting android made it the networked desktop of the world, but in no way sun/oracle predicted it :)
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Well, Sun did offer Java free of charge for everything except mobile (hence the infamous lawsuit), so it’s not like they didn’t think of that.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I find it kindof odd that the Blu-Ray disc adopted Java as a standard, that is, every Blu-Ray disk is really a big Java "applet" that runs on the player. Pretty frequently the "applet" is a stock player with a small amount of customization since Hollywood isn't any more interested in software development than TV station owners: that is, an interactive ATSC 3 TV channel is just a single page app that gets events from a websocket server embedded in the TV.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lmm 4y ago
Which ones did it deliver on? Faster than C? No. A memory-safe language that you can write OSes and drivers in? No. Pleasant cross-platform GUIs? No. Easy code reuse? No. Low code development by using XML? No. Not needing generics? No. Checked exceptions being a good idea? No. More understandable code by using classes instead of lambdas? Hell no. Java more or less got "write once, run anywhere" working, I'll give them that (although I still see programs that e.g. use a hardcoded path separator, they're the exception rather than the rule). But it's hard to see anything that it really delivered on in terms of working better than e.g. OCaml.
- watwut 4y ago
  While Java is actually fast now and fairly often faster then C, it was not original promiss at all. > Easy code reuse? Yes, as proven by rally large ecosystem of libraries and frameworks. All of that is literally code reuse. > Low code development by using XML? No. This was NOT original promiss at all. Again, these were first attempt at creating larger frameworks. > Not needing generics? No. Checked exceptions being a good idea? No. What are you talking about here? And yes both generics and checked exceptions have their use and dont make creating or maintennance of software hard at all.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > While Java is actually fast now and fairly often faster then C, it was not original promiss at all. It was absolutely something that was claimed at the time. Java's JIT, good as it is, has not lived up to the hype, to the point that newer languages (and even newer versions of Java itself) are moving away from it. > This was NOT original promiss at all. Again, these were first attempt at creating larger frameworks. It was absolutely something that was advertised by Spring and by Java EE, and didn't pan out. > What are you talking about here? And yes both generics and checked exceptions have their use and dont make creating or maintennance of software hard at all. The original Java claimed that a feature like C++ templating was not needed, which proved to be false. Checked exceptions are widely regarded as a failure; no major new language (even on the JVM) uses them.
    - 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

I was coding in Java before it reached 1.0. I remember getting into an argument with two guys in the men's room in Center Ithaca circa 1995, they thought Java was overhyped, I thought it was going to to be big. I was right, with the caveat that the original "applet" use case where you wrote little GUI apps to run in a rectangle in a web browser turned out to be a complete wash.

agumonkey 4y ago
not a lot of java's original goal succeeded, applet died, desktop died .. for some reason it matched well with enterprise in a time where heavy would sell in big companies in a funny way, the jvm hitting android made it the networked desktop of the world, but in no way sun/oracle predicted it :)
- kaba0 4y ago
  Well, Sun did offer Java free of charge for everything except mobile (hence the infamous lawsuit), so it’s not like they didn’t think of that.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I find it kindof odd that the Blu-Ray disc adopted Java as a standard, that is, every Blu-Ray disk is really a big Java "applet" that runs on the player. Pretty frequently the "applet" is a stock player with a small amount of customization since Hollywood isn't any more interested in software development than TV station owners: that is, an interactive ATSC 3 TV channel is just a single page app that gets events from a websocket server embedded in the TV.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lmm 4y ago

Which ones did it deliver on? Faster than C? No. A memory-safe language that you can write OSes and drivers in? No. Pleasant cross-platform GUIs? No. Easy code reuse? No. Low code development by using XML? No. Not needing generics? No. Checked exceptions being a good idea? No. More understandable code by using classes instead of lambdas? Hell no. Java more or less got "write once, run anywhere" working, I'll give them that (although I still see programs that e.g. use a hardcoded path separator, they're the exception rather than the rule). But it's hard to see anything that it really delivered on in terms of working better than e.g. OCaml.

watwut 4y ago
While Java is actually fast now and fairly often faster then C, it was not original promiss at all. > Easy code reuse? Yes, as proven by rally large ecosystem of libraries and frameworks. All of that is literally code reuse. > Low code development by using XML? No. This was NOT original promiss at all. Again, these were first attempt at creating larger frameworks. > Not needing generics? No. Checked exceptions being a good idea? No. What are you talking about here? And yes both generics and checked exceptions have their use and dont make creating or maintennance of software hard at all.
- lmm 4y ago
  > While Java is actually fast now and fairly often faster then C, it was not original promiss at all. It was absolutely something that was claimed at the time. Java's JIT, good as it is, has not lived up to the hype, to the point that newer languages (and even newer versions of Java itself) are moving away from it. > This was NOT original promiss at all. Again, these were first attempt at creating larger frameworks. It was absolutely something that was advertised by Spring and by Java EE, and didn't pan out. > What are you talking about here? And yes both generics and checked exceptions have their use and dont make creating or maintennance of software hard at all. The original Java claimed that a feature like C++ templating was not needed, which proved to be false. Checked exceptions are widely regarded as a failure; no major new language (even on the JVM) uses them.
  - 4y ago