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> Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it

by neilv 2y ago

> Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. > Initially I drank the kool-aid and was thrilled about this new “modern” language that was going to take over the world, and drooled at the notion of Java-based computers, containing Java chips that could run java byte-code as their native machine code. Exactly. I was lucky to see Java when it was still called Oak, and then I developed some of the first (non-animation) Java applets and small desktop applications outside of Sun/JavaSoft. It was very exciting (speaking as a programmer in C, C++, Smalltalk, a little Self, a little Lisp, and other languages at the time). The language itself wasn't as cool as Lisp or Smalltalk, but it was a nice halfway compromise from C++, with some of its own less exotic but nice features and ergonomics. It was already in the browsers, had next-gen embedded systems for the Internet at the forefront from the beginning, there was a proof-of-concept of a better kind of Web browser using it, Sun putting even putting it in rings for ubiquitous computing, there were thin clients that could get interesting (combined with Sun's "The Network Is The Computer", even if historically techies didn't like underpowered diskless workstations, except to give to non-techies), etc., and it only promised to get better... Then I turned my back for a sec., and the next time I looked, Java had been kicked out of the browser, and most all of the energy (except for the Android gambit) seemed to be focused on pitching Java for corporate internal software development. And suddenly no one else seemed to want to touch it, even if there wasn't much better. (Python, for example, from the same era, was one person's simplified end user extension language; and not intended for application development.) Yet another case of technology adoption not going how you'd initially think it would.

markus_zhang 2y ago
I'm curious about what happened. IIRC, as you mentioned too in your reply, that Java was supposed to run in embedded devices. It was supposed to be lean and fast. But I can't imagine the modern Java doing that...
- toast0 2y ago
  I mean, it runs on phones and Blu-Ray players. Of course, our phones now need 4 gb of ram so they don't have to swap out their launchers...
- ciberado 2y ago
  Version 1.0 ran quite smoothly once we upgraded the machines from 4MB to 8MB of RAM (seriously!). But, of course, at those times 8MB was much more memory than the early smartishphones carried, so their Java version was heavily stripped down and almost good-for-nothing. On the PC Front, James Gosling and cia made were an amazing team, but they pushed for very academic and cumbersome patterns that converged in the EJB architecture. Nobody in its sane mind would fall in love with that. Two or three years later, the internet bubble fallout affected every technology.
  - bzzzt 2y ago
    EJB was not invented by Gosling but adopted from IBM. It combined over-engineered concepts from the mainframe world combined with objects and too much XML configuration. Nowadays we've got Kubernetes with YAML for that.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      Java is a domain specific language for converting XML into stack dumps. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252103 >The background is that Terry Winograd, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, had invited me to lecture on some of my work in 1998. After my talk, Terry invited me to tour his lab and meet some of his graduate students. One of the Ph.D. students was a bright young fellow named Larry Page, who showed me his project to enhance the relevance of web search results. Many of those lectures are online. I was not able to find the 1998 one he mentioned, but here is one that Jakob Neilsen gave on May 20, 1994 called "Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces, Jakob Nielsen, Sunsoft". https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128 He gave another one on October 4 1996 entitled "Ensuring the Usability of the Next Computing Paradigm", but I can't find it in the online collection, although it exists in the inventory of video recordings, however I can't find any 1998 talks by Jakob Nielsen in this list: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Here is the entire online collection (it's kind of hard to search the 25 pages of the extensive collection, thanks to bad web site design!): https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a10637698 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5... The oldest (most interesting to me) ones are at the end (page 25): https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a10637698&page=25 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a1... Here are some of the older ones that I think are historically important and especially interesting (but there are so many I haven't watched them all, so there are certainly more that are worth watching): [...] Bringing Behavior to the Internet, James Gosling, SUN Microsystems [December 1, 1995]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047 I also uploaded this historically interesting video to youtube to generate closed captions and make it more accessible and findable, and I was planning on proofreading them like I did for this Will Wright talk, but haven't gotten around to it yet (any volunteers? ;): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k This is an early talk by James Gosling on Java, which I attended and appeared on camera asking a couple questions about security (44:53, 1:00:35), and I also spotted Ken Kahn asking a question (50:20). Can anyone identify other people in the audience? My questions about the “optical illusion attack” and security at 44:53 got kind of awkward, and his defensive "shrug" answer hasn't aged too well! ;) No hard feelings of course, since we’d known each other for years before (working on Emacs and NeWS) and we’re still friends, but I’d recently been working on Kaleida ScriptX, which lost out to Java in part because Java was touted as being so “secure”, and I didn’t appreciate how Sun was promoting Java by throwing the word “secure” around without defining what it really meant or what its limitations were (expecting people to read more into it than it really meant, on purpose, to hype up Java).
pjmlp 2y ago
Where I stand, outside HN circles, I see Java all over the place, including embedded. And frankly Electron is a much worse experience than Swing apps, but there is nothing like helping Chrome taking over Web and desktop as the platform to rule them all. /s
- sgt 2y ago
  Was not a big fan of Swing, but sure most things beat Electron because it doesn't quite "right". There is definitely some desktop experience being lost, aside from it being a memory and CPU hog.
  - jen20 2y ago
    The only reasonable “feeling” Java app I’m aware of on the desktop is IntelliJ (and derivatives) - but AFAIK JetBrains have had to fork almost every part of the ecosystem to make that a reality.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Usually what happens is that most folks write Java Swing, or used to, with programmer art, instead of reading material like Filty Rich Clients, and having a designer team. Which is kind of what JetBrains did, as do other companies that know their stuff, e.g. https://www.bitwig.com https://www.bitwig.com

by neilv 2y ago

markus_zhang 2y ago

I'm curious about what happened. IIRC, as you mentioned too in your reply, that Java was supposed to run in embedded devices. It was supposed to be lean and fast. But I can't imagine the modern Java doing that...

toast0 2y ago
I mean, it runs on phones and Blu-Ray players. Of course, our phones now need 4 gb of ram so they don't have to swap out their launchers...
ciberado 2y ago
Version 1.0 ran quite smoothly once we upgraded the machines from 4MB to 8MB of RAM (seriously!). But, of course, at those times 8MB was much more memory than the early smartishphones carried, so their Java version was heavily stripped down and almost good-for-nothing. On the PC Front, James Gosling and cia made were an amazing team, but they pushed for very academic and cumbersome patterns that converged in the EJB architecture. Nobody in its sane mind would fall in love with that. Two or three years later, the internet bubble fallout affected every technology.
- bzzzt 2y ago
  EJB was not invented by Gosling but adopted from IBM. It combined over-engineered concepts from the mainframe world combined with objects and too much XML configuration. Nowadays we've got Kubernetes with YAML for that.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Java is a domain specific language for converting XML into stack dumps. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252103 >The background is that Terry Winograd, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, had invited me to lecture on some of my work in 1998. After my talk, Terry invited me to tour his lab and meet some of his graduate students. One of the Ph.D. students was a bright young fellow named Larry Page, who showed me his project to enhance the relevance of web search results. Many of those lectures are online. I was not able to find the 1998 one he mentioned, but here is one that Jakob Neilsen gave on May 20, 1994 called "Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces, Jakob Nielsen, Sunsoft". https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128 He gave another one on October 4 1996 entitled "Ensuring the Usability of the Next Computing Paradigm", but I can't find it in the online collection, although it exists in the inventory of video recordings, however I can't find any 1998 talks by Jakob Nielsen in this list: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Here is the entire online collection (it's kind of hard to search the 25 pages of the extensive collection, thanks to bad web site design!): https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a10637698 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5... The oldest (most interesting to me) ones are at the end (page 25): https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a10637698&page=25 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a1... Here are some of the older ones that I think are historically important and especially interesting (but there are so many I haven't watched them all, so there are certainly more that are worth watching): [...] Bringing Behavior to the Internet, James Gosling, SUN Microsystems [December 1, 1995]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047 I also uploaded this historically interesting video to youtube to generate closed captions and make it more accessible and findable, and I was planning on proofreading them like I did for this Will Wright talk, but haven't gotten around to it yet (any volunteers? ;): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k This is an early talk by James Gosling on Java, which I attended and appeared on camera asking a couple questions about security (44:53, 1:00:35), and I also spotted Ken Kahn asking a question (50:20). Can anyone identify other people in the audience? My questions about the “optical illusion attack” and security at 44:53 got kind of awkward, and his defensive "shrug" answer hasn't aged too well! ;) No hard feelings of course, since we’d known each other for years before (working on Emacs and NeWS) and we’re still friends, but I’d recently been working on Kaleida ScriptX, which lost out to Java in part because Java was touted as being so “secure”, and I didn’t appreciate how Sun was promoting Java by throwing the word “secure” around without defining what it really meant or what its limitations were (expecting people to read more into it than it really meant, on purpose, to hype up Java).

pjmlp 2y ago

Where I stand, outside HN circles, I see Java all over the place, including embedded. And frankly Electron is a much worse experience than Swing apps, but there is nothing like helping Chrome taking over Web and desktop as the platform to rule them all. /s

sgt 2y ago
Was not a big fan of Swing, but sure most things beat Electron because it doesn't quite "right". There is definitely some desktop experience being lost, aside from it being a memory and CPU hog.
- jen20 2y ago
  The only reasonable “feeling” Java app I’m aware of on the desktop is IntelliJ (and derivatives) - but AFAIK JetBrains have had to fork almost every part of the ecosystem to make that a reality.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Usually what happens is that most folks write Java Swing, or used to, with programmer art, instead of reading material like Filty Rich Clients, and having a designer team. Which is kind of what JetBrains did, as do other companies that know their stuff, e.g. https://www.bitwig.com https://www.bitwig.com