7 ms·

Wow, how can you seriously plan releases of a programming language out to 2021? That is an eternity in this industry. Even 2015 for JDK 9 seems mighty far off,

by JunkDNA 15y ago

Wow, how can you seriously plan releases of a programming language out to 2021? That is an eternity in this industry. Even 2015 for JDK 9 seems mighty far off, especially accounting for the usual slippage of release dates with big software projects.

CodeMage 15y ago
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think you can seriously plan releases so far in future. What you can do is delude yourself (which happens all the time at big bureaucracies) or make it look like you're planning seriously in order to appear responsible and visionary.
- lapusta 15y ago
  It pretty much depends on industry. Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone. Now look at the web: it was more of a evolution than revolution. What happened at back-end, like server-side functionality of business apps? They didn't really change and probably won't change for a longer period of time. Even stuff like Hadoop for big data or Groovy for DSLs were built upon the existing JVM. It's hard to say what devices we'll have in 5 years, or what internet would look like, but i'm pretty sure servers would run good old Java.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Even on the "evolutionary" web, I don't think anyone in 2007 would have predicted the rise (and now... fall?) of MVC frameworks or the explosion of jQuery, both of which existed and were relatively popular at the time. Likewise the NoSQL rebellion was a surprise. Five years from now, we'll all be using WebGL-based dyanmic UIs. Or will we? I think the point is more that 5+ year planning in the tech industry is simply pointless, not that all technologies will be replaced. Sure, there are some constants. We can all safely predict that in five years we'll still be writing drivers and middleware in C, still be using zlib and libjpeg, etc...
    - jsight 15y ago
      Yes, it is extremely difficult to predict which technologies will win over a 5-10 year period vs their competitors. Eg, predicting that jQuery would appear vs the evolution of some other system (ExtJS?). On the other hand, predicting what changes will occur to a legacy enterprise system tend to be much easier. In the overall scope of things, Java hasn't really changed that much over the past five years. I think that some long-range planning of the kinds of changes they are thinking about actually makes sense. The need for closures, reified generic types, and an improved type system is unlikely to change in the next 5-10 years.
  - hammersend 15y ago
    "Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone." Blackberry remains much more relevant than windows phone. You also forgot to mention Bada which also has more share than wp and is growing. I'm not trying to beat up on wp but as it stands reality conflicts significantly with marketing. Edit: why the down mod? if I'm in error, please point out where.
    - lapusta 15y ago
      Their new platform (BB 10) is incompatible with old apps. And Bada was merged into Tizen, so it's future looks uncertain for me.
  - vorg 15y ago
    > stuff like Hadoop for big data or Groovy for DSLs were built upon the existing JVM Hadoop become popular for handling big data, but I'm not sure if many are using Groovy for DSL's. The 2 big uses for Groovy in industry seem to be (1) scripting on Grails, and (2) quick standalone scripts for testing or booting Java code. For these it rocks but the stuff added after Groovy 1.0, such as DSL's, isn't really being used much.
viraptor 15y ago
Considering it's Java and some people are still thinking about whether to upgrade from 1.5... Yeah - it may make sense in their case.
- deepinit_arek 15y ago
  And considering you own industry, and language basically. YES WE CAN!
sek 15y ago
Why don't they start now and build Java 2.0 from ground up instead of Java 10 for 2017? That would be way faster and they learned so much by now to make a great successor. Who wants a Java 1.x in 2040?
- mahmud 15y ago
  by the time the rebuilt java2.0-NG reaches stability it will be 2017, or whatever.
- francoisdevlin 15y ago
  Because they learned from netscape's mistake, that's why. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
  - lhnz 15y ago
    "You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists." On the contrary, there has been a number of times that I've completely rewritten some code to use a framework or library that was already battle-tested and more fully-featured than the previous effort. I ended up saving myself from writing code that already exists.
    - anonymous 15y ago
      Right, but you're one person and you're redoing the plumbing. At this point oracle can't rewrite Java. If they don't support the current programs, nobody would use it, if they do, they will really be rewriting code that already exists.
  - sek 15y ago
    I didn't say they should rewrite everything, but to make a new Java version with backward incompatibilities. Drop a new 1.x version on java for decades can't be the solution.
  - moonboots 15y ago
    The netscape rewrite became Firefox.
kamaal 15y ago
Not when you consider Java as a 'business' for Oracle. And business planning is always done like this. If Java no longer remains useful to Oracle expect the same thing what happened to things like flash. It will be donated to Apache software foundation.
- floppydisk 15y ago
  Apache and the Open Source community already have a Java implementation in the Open JDK. One thing not touched on in the article but would definitely be worth know is if Oracle will start inserting "pay-to-use" features in the language or release a solid JIT compiler and run time companies must pay for in order to use. I know it's been bandied about in the past that Oracle might start restricting access to some language features and with such a long term roadmap, I'm wondering if they're thinking about making some of these selling point features into business revenue features.
  - benjarrell 15y ago
    http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hotspot-rt/hotspot/rev/763f01599ff4 http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hotspot-rt/hotspot/rev/763f01...
mindcrime 15y ago
> Wow, how can you seriously plan releases of a programming language out to 2021? "A plan is useless, but planning is essential" [1] More true than ever, if you ask me. Sure, you make plans, why wouldn't you? But you also retain the flexibility to adapt the plan as the environment changes. You don't chisel the damn plan into a stack of stone tablets and render it immutable for all time. I don't see any conflict whatsoever in planning out through 2021. I would say that in doing so, there's an implicit assumption that the plan - especially the farther reaches of it - are subject to change and are based on current best guesses. [1]: paraphrase of a quote attributed to Dwight Eisenhower, which was probably in turn a paraphrase of another quote. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower
- samspot 15y ago
  Exactly, there is nothing wrong with long range planning. Planning this far out allows you LOTS of time to iterate on your plans, making them better.
  - kamaal 15y ago
    I think ultra long term planning is what you call 'premature optimization'
    - ajryan 15y ago
      Premature optimizations are actually carried out before their future impact is known. Planning is different.
jrockway 15y ago
Java is already 30 years behind the state of the art, so planning 10 years ahead is very easy. Just do what other languages were doing 20 years ago. (Fuck boxed primitive types. How about generics that weren't designed by drunk retarded monkeys?)
- spacemanaki 15y ago
  Yep, Gilad Bracha, Philip Wadler, Martin Odersky... all drunken, retarded monkeys.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    So you're saying that type erasure makes programming easier and less error prone?
    - ootachi 15y ago
      What choice did they have? Either break compatibility, or use type erasure.
      - kamaal 15y ago
        Oracle's primary concern isn't to rewrite Java or to spend resources to make Java awesome enough to compete with the latest stuff that is coming. Their fundamental concern is to milk Java as much and as long as they can to drive their sales for Oracle DB and associated business products. And that makes perfect sense too, they are in business to make money anything else and they won't be doing their job properly. Don't you see what has become of Sun Microsystems? They were making awesome stuff by the day for somebody else's profits. Oracle is not going to make the same mistake again. Java is oracle's strategic investment in using that as a leverage to drive sales else where. And looking at their segment, its mean't mostly for large corporate programmers and not hacker, start ups and alike. I bet IBM makes sufficient contribution to COBOL still just to keep their mainframe sales alive and not because they want COBOL to be awesome enough to rule the world. Similarly Oracle's contributions and investments to Java are going to be for driving their sales not for sake of making Java awesome.
ssmoot 15y ago
That's 9 years. I've used Ruby for almost as long, and on MRI at least, I can't think of anything as significant. (JRuby FTW) Think of c#'s evolution. Ruby's. JavaScript's. SQL's. 9 years isn't exactly blazingly aggressive, but in the context of a programming language it's not eyebrow raising either. I think generally that's a good thing.
cpeterso 15y ago
Java 6 was released in 2006. Java 7 was released in 2011. Almost 5 years. Java 8's planned release for 2013 may be overly optimistic.
- amalter 15y ago
  There was the small speedbump of Sun dying and being purchased by Oracle in the process. I'm no Oracle fanboi, but I bet without the legal and corporate circus, they will iterate faster.

by JunkDNA 15y ago

CodeMage 15y ago

Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think you can seriously plan releases so far in future. What you can do is delude yourself (which happens all the time at big bureaucracies) or make it look like you're planning seriously in order to appear responsible and visionary.

lapusta 15y ago
It pretty much depends on industry. Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone. Now look at the web: it was more of a evolution than revolution. What happened at back-end, like server-side functionality of business apps? They didn't really change and probably won't change for a longer period of time. Even stuff like Hadoop for big data or Groovy for DSLs were built upon the existing JVM. It's hard to say what devices we'll have in 5 years, or what internet would look like, but i'm pretty sure servers would run good old Java.
- ajross 15y ago
  Even on the "evolutionary" web, I don't think anyone in 2007 would have predicted the rise (and now... fall?) of MVC frameworks or the explosion of jQuery, both of which existed and were relatively popular at the time. Likewise the NoSQL rebellion was a surprise. Five years from now, we'll all be using WebGL-based dyanmic UIs. Or will we? I think the point is more that 5+ year planning in the tech industry is simply pointless, not that all technologies will be replaced. Sure, there are some constants. We can all safely predict that in five years we'll still be writing drivers and middleware in C, still be using zlib and libjpeg, etc...
  - jsight 15y ago
    Yes, it is extremely difficult to predict which technologies will win over a 5-10 year period vs their competitors. Eg, predicting that jQuery would appear vs the evolution of some other system (ExtJS?). On the other hand, predicting what changes will occur to a legacy enterprise system tend to be much easier. In the overall scope of things, Java hasn't really changed that much over the past five years. I think that some long-range planning of the kinds of changes they are thinking about actually makes sense. The need for closures, reified generic types, and an improved type system is unlikely to change in the next 5-10 years.
- hammersend 15y ago
  "Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone." Blackberry remains much more relevant than windows phone. You also forgot to mention Bada which also has more share than wp and is growing. I'm not trying to beat up on wp but as it stands reality conflicts significantly with marketing. Edit: why the down mod? if I'm in error, please point out where.
  - lapusta 15y ago
    Their new platform (BB 10) is incompatible with old apps. And Bada was merged into Tizen, so it's future looks uncertain for me.
- vorg 15y ago
  > stuff like Hadoop for big data or Groovy for DSLs were built upon the existing JVM Hadoop become popular for handling big data, but I'm not sure if many are using Groovy for DSL's. The 2 big uses for Groovy in industry seem to be (1) scripting on Grails, and (2) quick standalone scripts for testing or booting Java code. For these it rocks but the stuff added after Groovy 1.0, such as DSL's, isn't really being used much.

viraptor 15y ago

Considering it's Java and some people are still thinking about whether to upgrade from 1.5... Yeah - it may make sense in their case.

deepinit_arek 15y ago
And considering you own industry, and language basically. YES WE CAN!

sek 15y ago

Why don't they start now and build Java 2.0 from ground up instead of Java 10 for 2017? That would be way faster and they learned so much by now to make a great successor. Who wants a Java 1.x in 2040?

mahmud 15y ago
by the time the rebuilt java2.0-NG reaches stability it will be 2017, or whatever.
francoisdevlin 15y ago
Because they learned from netscape's mistake, that's why. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
- lhnz 15y ago
  "You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists." On the contrary, there has been a number of times that I've completely rewritten some code to use a framework or library that was already battle-tested and more fully-featured than the previous effort. I ended up saving myself from writing code that already exists.
  - anonymous 15y ago
    Right, but you're one person and you're redoing the plumbing. At this point oracle can't rewrite Java. If they don't support the current programs, nobody would use it, if they do, they will really be rewriting code that already exists.
- sek 15y ago
  I didn't say they should rewrite everything, but to make a new Java version with backward incompatibilities. Drop a new 1.x version on java for decades can't be the solution.
- moonboots 15y ago
  The netscape rewrite became Firefox.

kamaal 15y ago

Not when you consider Java as a 'business' for Oracle. And business planning is always done like this. If Java no longer remains useful to Oracle expect the same thing what happened to things like flash. It will be donated to Apache software foundation.

floppydisk 15y ago
Apache and the Open Source community already have a Java implementation in the Open JDK. One thing not touched on in the article but would definitely be worth know is if Oracle will start inserting "pay-to-use" features in the language or release a solid JIT compiler and run time companies must pay for in order to use. I know it's been bandied about in the past that Oracle might start restricting access to some language features and with such a long term roadmap, I'm wondering if they're thinking about making some of these selling point features into business revenue features.
- benjarrell 15y ago
  http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hotspot-rt/hotspot/rev/763f01599ff4 http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hotspot-rt/hotspot/rev/763f01...

mindcrime 15y ago

> Wow, how can you seriously plan releases of a programming language out to 2021? "A plan is useless, but planning is essential" [1] More true than ever, if you ask me. Sure, you make plans, why wouldn't you? But you also retain the flexibility to adapt the plan as the environment changes. You don't chisel the damn plan into a stack of stone tablets and render it immutable for all time. I don't see any conflict whatsoever in planning out through 2021. I would say that in doing so, there's an implicit assumption that the plan - especially the farther reaches of it - are subject to change and are based on current best guesses. [1]: paraphrase of a quote attributed to Dwight Eisenhower, which was probably in turn a paraphrase of another quote. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower

samspot 15y ago
Exactly, there is nothing wrong with long range planning. Planning this far out allows you LOTS of time to iterate on your plans, making them better.
- kamaal 15y ago
  I think ultra long term planning is what you call 'premature optimization'
  - ajryan 15y ago
    Premature optimizations are actually carried out before their future impact is known. Planning is different.

jrockway 15y ago

Java is already 30 years behind the state of the art, so planning 10 years ahead is very easy. Just do what other languages were doing 20 years ago. (Fuck boxed primitive types. How about generics that weren't designed by drunk retarded monkeys?)

spacemanaki 15y ago
Yep, Gilad Bracha, Philip Wadler, Martin Odersky... all drunken, retarded monkeys.
- jrockway 15y ago
  So you're saying that type erasure makes programming easier and less error prone?
  - ootachi 15y ago
    What choice did they have? Either break compatibility, or use type erasure.
    - kamaal 15y ago
      Oracle's primary concern isn't to rewrite Java or to spend resources to make Java awesome enough to compete with the latest stuff that is coming. Their fundamental concern is to milk Java as much and as long as they can to drive their sales for Oracle DB and associated business products. And that makes perfect sense too, they are in business to make money anything else and they won't be doing their job properly. Don't you see what has become of Sun Microsystems? They were making awesome stuff by the day for somebody else's profits. Oracle is not going to make the same mistake again. Java is oracle's strategic investment in using that as a leverage to drive sales else where. And looking at their segment, its mean't mostly for large corporate programmers and not hacker, start ups and alike. I bet IBM makes sufficient contribution to COBOL still just to keep their mainframe sales alive and not because they want COBOL to be awesome enough to rule the world. Similarly Oracle's contributions and investments to Java are going to be for driving their sales not for sake of making Java awesome.

ssmoot 15y ago

That's 9 years. I've used Ruby for almost as long, and on MRI at least, I can't think of anything as significant. (JRuby FTW) Think of c#'s evolution. Ruby's. JavaScript's. SQL's. 9 years isn't exactly blazingly aggressive, but in the context of a programming language it's not eyebrow raising either. I think generally that's a good thing.

cpeterso 15y ago

Java 6 was released in 2006. Java 7 was released in 2011. Almost 5 years. Java 8's planned release for 2013 may be overly optimistic.

amalter 15y ago
There was the small speedbump of Sun dying and being purchased by Oracle in the process. I'm no Oracle fanboi, but I bet without the legal and corporate circus, they will iterate faster.