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> Both because it was a young language, and had all the problems of a young language like poor library support for just about everything, and because the hardwa

by derriz 1y ago

> Both because it was a young language, and had all the problems of a young language like poor library support for just about everything, and because the hardware in 1997 wasn't ready to deliver on the hype. Outside of Perl’s CPAN, library support in 1997 sucked for all languages. Being able to write a hash-table or linked list C was a valuable commercial skill as nearly every single code base would include custom versions of these sorts of very basic data structures rather than pull them from a commonly used library. “Using a 3rd party library” meant copying a bunch of source code downloaded from who-knows-where into your source control repo and hacking it to work with whatever funky compiler and/or linker your project used.

jerf 1y ago
I mean even by the standard of the time, though. The Java hype meant that if a UI wasn't written in Java, it sucked, so everything had to use the Java UI. But even as young as Windows still was at the time, the UI toolkits were much more developed than the Java ones. The Java ones looked like they were written to a bullet-point list of the minimal features they needed to shove them out the door, in a new language nobody knew, which is probably because they were. As with Rational Rose, even as a student I could ram straight into a brick wall of missing features every direction I turned. I can only imagine what a professional of that era had to deal with. Compare that with a modern student, where they may still not know how to do a given thing but their main problem is that they don't know how to find or evaluate the hundreds of options that exist. I know that it wasn't like it is today where a casual weekend hobby project can easily pull in a few hundred libraries with just a couple of shell commands, but you still needed some things to get going. It was theoretically possible to sit down with a blank text editor and write assembly code that functioned as a GUI app, the last few dying gasps of that philosophy were around, but it's not what most people did.
- derriz 1y ago
  Well that’s a more specific criticism - that AWT sucked. I won’t defend Java GUIs from the period having worked on a 1990s Java AWT based GUI application. Although, SWT apps like eclipse were decent enough. I think in the context of the time, Java was simply following the common least-common-denominator approach, common for cross-platform GUI toolkits at the time - tcl/tk was hot at the time as were commercial products like powerbuilder. This approach was to only include features/funtionality which mapped directly to native for all supported platforms - Mac, windows and some X11 toolkit. There were convincing arguments for this approach at the time - you got native look and behavior from the same code for all platforms Java ran on, like with TK but it quickly came apparent that this approach was a technological cul-de-sac limited to simple dialogs and form-based GUIs.

by derriz 1y ago

jerf 1y ago

I mean even by the standard of the time, though. The Java hype meant that if a UI wasn't written in Java, it sucked, so everything had to use the Java UI. But even as young as Windows still was at the time, the UI toolkits were much more developed than the Java ones. The Java ones looked like they were written to a bullet-point list of the minimal features they needed to shove them out the door, in a new language nobody knew, which is probably because they were. As with Rational Rose, even as a student I could ram straight into a brick wall of missing features every direction I turned. I can only imagine what a professional of that era had to deal with. Compare that with a modern student, where they may still not know how to do a given thing but their main problem is that they don't know how to find or evaluate the hundreds of options that exist. I know that it wasn't like it is today where a casual weekend hobby project can easily pull in a few hundred libraries with just a couple of shell commands, but you still needed some things to get going. It was theoretically possible to sit down with a blank text editor and write assembly code that functioned as a GUI app, the last few dying gasps of that philosophy were around, but it's not what most people did.

derriz 1y ago
Well that’s a more specific criticism - that AWT sucked. I won’t defend Java GUIs from the period having worked on a 1990s Java AWT based GUI application. Although, SWT apps like eclipse were decent enough. I think in the context of the time, Java was simply following the common least-common-denominator approach, common for cross-platform GUI toolkits at the time - tcl/tk was hot at the time as were commercial products like powerbuilder. This approach was to only include features/funtionality which mapped directly to native for all supported platforms - Mac, windows and some X11 toolkit. There were convincing arguments for this approach at the time - you got native look and behavior from the same code for all platforms Java ran on, like with TK but it quickly came apparent that this approach was a technological cul-de-sac limited to simple dialogs and form-based GUIs.