Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

https://thenewstack.io/java-at-30-the-genius-behind-the-code-that-changed-tech/

by chhum • 1 year ago

253 416 1 year ago

Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get remote work for a decade.

As long as I am expressing gratitude, I would also like to call out the Clojure team for developing a wonderful ecosystem in top of Java and the JVM.

It must be wonderful to do work that positively affects the lives of millions of people.

jgneff• 1 year ago

I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building.

I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.

fidotron7• 1 year ago

I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.

It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.

dragandj3• 1 year ago

Both James Gosling (Java) and Rich Hickey (Clojure) are amazing creators! Each brought a breath of fresh air to programming at their respective times.

jbellis3• 1 year ago

On my list of programmers I want to meet before it's too late, along with Brian Kernighan.

cloudking• 1 year ago

Why is Java so popular in enterprise?

tylerflick• 1 year ago

My guess is the size of the talent pool to hire from.

hackthemack2• 1 year ago

I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimmer that it was the "Enterprise Way" of doing "Real IT" programming for "Real Businesses". I am not saying any of that is the "Truth", just the perception that was held by the majority of people who could choose what to write enterprise code in.

toyg• 1 year ago

Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it

And Oracle (well before the Sun acquisition - in fact, control of Java was basically the main cause of that move).

Any technology that could bag both IBM and Oracle is (or rather was) likely to dominate the enterprise space.

fidotron7• 1 year ago

What was the viable alternative?

Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure.

At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.

aaronbaugher2• 1 year ago

Yes, its early popularity was very much management-driven, based on magazine articles and the like. Its object-oriented design (often presented as if something new) was supposed to make programmers fungible, and its portability was supposed to let you build an app that would run on anything. And it had a Real Corporation behind it, which appealed to corporate management.

In the late 90s, I got stuck making a scheduling program in Java, but it had to run on the 16-bit Windows systems of the time. That was a huge pain, because the 16-bit version didn't have all the capabilities that management was expecting based on the hype. These days, I sometimes have to install enormous enterprise applications that tie up north of 32G of RAM even though they're just basic hardware management tools that would take a fraction of that if built in something like C++ with a standard GUI library. I manage to avoid Java most of the time, but it's been an occasional thorn in my side for 30 years.

locopati• 1 year ago

it hits a sweet spot of reliable, C-like, fast enough for most things, with a ton of library/framework support. plus Sun and later Oracle pushed it hard in the 90s/00s. it'll be the new COBOL.

mpalfrey• 1 year ago

Decent talent pool.

Decent tooling. Been around for long enough that a lot of the quirks of it are well known and documented. Basically it's a blue collar programming language without too many gotchas. Modern(ish) day Cobol.

(I'm predominantly a Java dev still, even after diversions over the years to Javascript, Python and C#).

lemonwaterlime• 1 year ago

Among other things, because the structure of the code corresponds to the structure of the organization itself.

Things tend to form fractal systems of systems for efficiency. A cleanly delineated org chart maps to a cleanly delineated codebase.

keeganpoppen• 1 year ago

on one level this is clearly “shipping the org chart”, but… honestly, even as no fan of Java this is clearly efficient on many levels, especially when you consider the humans and org to be part of the system (which everyone should. or it’s just my HCI brain talking.).

eBombzor• 1 year ago

Spring Boot

j45• 1 year ago

Another way to look at it based on coming across it in enterprise:

How did he build something adopted by so many enterprises?

It does some things at scale very well and has been afforded the performance improvements of very smart people for 30y.

It’s not to say the language isn’t verbose, one of my favourite features was the ability to write code in other languages right inside the a Java app pretty well in-line by using the JVM, thanks to JSR-223.

It was possible to write Ruby or Python code via Jruby or Jython and run it in the JVM.

https://www.jython.org/

https://www.jruby.org/

Clojure also runs on the JVM.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/scrip...

izacus• 1 year ago

Because there was nothing else quite like it at the time most enterprise software was created or recreated.

And it's still stable, fast and reliable with a massive ecosystem of stable, fast and reliable libraries and software. With good developer tooling, profilers and debuggers to go with it. And big enterprise support teams from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, etc. throwing in their (paid) support services.

It might not be the best language in any of the categories (speed - runtime and compile time, tooling, ecosystem, portability, employee pool), but there's pretty much almost no languages that are as good in all categories at once.

And to top it off, JVM can host other languages so it can easily interoperate with more modern takes on language design like Kotlin while still running on pretty much all major operating systems used in the wild and most CPU architectures as well. It'll run on your car's SoC, your phone and on your server. In many cases, using the same libraries and same code underneath.

js82• 1 year ago

I believe there were alternatives at the time, but expensive. Java was free and also syntactically compatible with C++. I think that rather these properties (than being somewhat unique) are the main causes of its success.

ben7799• 1 year ago

Java beta & 1.0 were released my Freshman year of college and I've been writing Java ever since. With the exception of one job where we tried to write a Java-style Enterprise security cloud application in Python every commercial product I've worked on has been built in primarily Java, often times with other languages on the edges of the application.

The key thing I think with Java is the programming model & structure scale well with team size and with codebase size, perhaps even in a way that tolerates junior developers, outsourced sub-teams, and even lower quality developers. All of those things end up becoming part of your reality on big Enterprise products, so if the language is somehow adding some tolerance for it that is a good thing.

The other things around Syntax and such that people complain about? Those are often minor considerations once the team size and code base size get large enough. Across my career there has always been the lone guy complaining that if we did everything in a LISP derived language everything would be perfect. But that guy has almost always been the guy who worked on a small tool off by himself, not on the main product.

Java has changed a tremendous amount as well. A modern Java system has very little in common with something written before Generics and before all the Functional code has been added. Where I work now we have heavily exploited the Functional java add-ons for years, it has been fantastic.

snovymgodym2• 1 year ago

Because it was in the right place at the right time to supplant C++ and C for application code.

octo888• 1 year ago

It's safe. It's easy to hire anyone from anywhere to write Java. You generally can't create an ungodly mess apart from layers and thousands of classes. There's a library for almost everything. It'll still be around in 10/20 years. It's good enough

zmmmmm2• 1 year ago

Consider that in the mid 90's when it arose, most organisations were writing business code in C++ and paying license fees for things as simple as string handling libraries. There was almost no good solution to cross platform network code. RPC calls required things like manually dealing with byte order.

Then most organisations had deployed windows for staff but needed to run things on Sun servers. Java was a god send as a free and actually cross platform solution that let devs work on windows and run the same thing on the corporate server infra without changes. The culture at the time would not consider deploying scripting language sfor full scale applications acceptable, so Java with it's C++-like structure but built in cross platform capabilities and generous stack of batteries included libraries (for the time) was an absolute god send.

exabrial5• 1 year ago

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

dragandj3• 1 year ago

Throw in Clojure into the mix, and you get superpowers!

exabrial5• 1 year ago

I'm still trying to mentally grok the Clojure model and syntax hah. On my todo list. Clojure users seem to love it though. Do you have a tutorial that could sell it to me?

znpy3• 1 year ago

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.

You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.

The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.

nxobject2• 1 year ago

The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

As someone who's always been interested in gamedev, I genuinely wonder whether that would be good enough to implement cutting-edge combo modern acceleration structures/streaming systems (e.g. UE5's Nanite level-of-detail system.)

I have the ability to understand these modern systems abstractly, and I have the ability to write some high-intensity nearly stutter-free gamedev code that balances memory collection and allocation for predicable latency, but not both, at least without mistakes.

neonsunset8• 1 year ago

Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.

It is not feasible under the JVM type system. Even once Valhalla gets released it will carry restrictions that will keep that highly impractical.

It's much less needed with ZGC but even the poster child C# from the GC-based language family when it comes to writing allocation-free and zero-cost abstraction code presents challenges the second you need to use code written by someone who does not care as much about performance.

astrange4• 1 year ago

I'm honestly amazed people say this about Java, because the language almost couldn't be worse at giving you tools to use memory efficiently.

There's no value types (outside primitives) and everything is about pointer chasing. And surely if there was less pointer chasing it'd be easier to do the GC work at the same time.

brightball3• 1 year ago

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier.

Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so poor until it started improving around 2006-2007.

Now I keep an eye on it for other languages that run on the JVM: JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, etc.

IMO JRuby is the most interesting since you gain access to 2 very mature ecosystems by using it. When Java introduced Project Loom and made it possible to use Ruby's Fibers on the JVM via Virtual Threads it was a win for both.

Charles Nutter really doesn't get anywhere close to enough credit for his work there.

cogman103• 1 year ago

Let me extol the virtues of Java the language.

You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this day without recompiling it.

Both Ruby and Python, with pedigrees nearly as old as Java's, have made changes to their languages which make things look better, but ultimately break things. Heck, C++ tends to have so many undefined quirks and common compiler extensions that it's not uncommon to see code that only compiles with specific C++ compilers.

jbverschoor5• 1 year ago

Oh yeah. I still don’t understand why we even moved away from the original JEE model, including the different roles (app dev, deployed, etc).

The whole spec was great with the exception of entitybeans.

It provided things that are still not available it anything else.. why do we store configuration/credentials in git (encrypted, but still).

And the context were easy to configure/enter.

Caucho’s resin, highly underrated app server. Maybe not underrated, but at least not very well known

ksec• 1 year ago

It is unfortunate the whole JRuby doesn't get more attention and it seems Rails community dont use JRuby much.

JRuby could also run on Graal as well.

nxobject2• 1 year ago

Third best consistently used over 3 decades adds up to a great, great deal. Although, to be fair, a great deal has been invested in cutting edge GCs for the JVM – some fresh out of research.

jbellis3• 1 year ago

more like 100x faster than Python/Ruby

and that's before you throw in real multithreading

timbit42• 1 year ago

I have heard around 50x, which is about the same as between assembly and BASIC on 8-bit systems.

igouy7• 1 year ago

Let's not pluck numbers out of thin air.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

tootie3• 1 year ago

The language has/had some rough edges that have been improved over the years, but the developer experience of using a strongly-typed, object-oriented language within a sturdy IDE like Idea is just second to none. The debugging process is so very straightforward. Java became synonymous with enterprisey bloated systems for good reason, but there is no pile of mud Java system that can't be stepped through cleanly with a debugger.

I'd also throw in what was possibly their greatest idea that sped adoption and that's javadoc. I'm not sure it was a 100% original idea, but having inline docs baked into the compiler and generating HTML documentation automatically was a real godsend for building libraries and making them usable very quickly. Strong typing also lined up nicely with making the documents hyper-linkable.

Java was really made to solve problems for large engineering teams moreso than a single developer at a keyboard.

Terr_• 1 year ago

I find these discussions have an interior split between the folks who are more concerned with getting the feature out now versus the folks who have had to keep a thousand ancient features running.

topspin• 1 year ago

javadoc

Indeed. Many languages have something similar to Javadoc, yet somehow I haven't encountered anything quite as good as Javadoc, and I can't explain why or exactly how it's better. I admit I haven't tried that hard either. But I suspect it's down to the nature of the language and how, with well designed libraries at least (and not all are, certainly,) there is a nice decomposition of modules, packages, classes/interfaces and methods that leads to everything somehow having a correct place, and the Javadoc just follows. The strong typing is another contributor, where 90% of the time you can just look and the signature and imply what is intended. Finally, the old-fashioned frames based HTML typically used with Javadoc is a great benefit.

Also, I've found I experience less reluctance to author Javadoc for some reason. Again, part of this is due to strong types, and much of the legwork being correctly generated in nearly every case.

Lombok, when used with moderation, is wonderful. Mockito is magic, of a good kind. Maven still gets it done for me; I've yet to care about any problems Gradle purports to solve, and I think that's down to not creating the problems that Gradle is designed to paper over in the first place.

Today, if I had my choice of one thing I'd like to see in Java that doesn't presently exist it's Python's "yield". Yes, there are several ways to achieve this in Java. I want the totally frictionless generators of Python in Java.

datavirtue2• 1 year ago

This. It set the stage for modern enterprise software that we all take for granted now.

badc0ffee• 1 year ago

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Fastest at what, exactly?

jonhohle3• 1 year ago

I’m slightly surprised there isn’t more KVM/Virtualized bare metal JVM environments. While I haven’t used it in a while, the decade+ I spent running Javan’s in production basically have the entire system over to the JVM (with some overhead for some small non-JVM background daemons). Most things were built not to use POSIX standards, but Java equivalents. Occasionally direct file system access for writes was necessary (logging being a big exception).

So giving the entire system to the JVM, performing some warmup prior to a service considering itself “healthy”, and the JVM was reasonably fast. It devoured memory and you couldn’t really do anything else with the host, but you got the Java ecosystem, for better or worse).

There was a lot of good tooling that is missing from other platforms, but also a ton of overhead that I am happy to not have to deal with at the moment.

briankelly4• 1 year ago

Having a hard time finding it now, but someone put together a benchmark with two categories - naive and optimized - comparing implementations across languages with a workload vaguely resembling a real-world business application server with a mix of long and short lived objects. Java was at the top of the naive benchmark by a landslide and behind C and C++ (edit: and probably Rust) for the optimized ranking, but with a gap before the rest of the field.

With the JVM you basically outsource all the work you need to do in C/C++ to optimize memory management and a typical developer is going to have a hell of a time beating it for non-trivial, heterogenous workloads. The main disadvantage (at least as I understand) is the memory overhead that Java objects incur which prevent it from being fully optimized the way you can with C/C++.

lelanthran2• 1 year ago

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad.

When Java got popular, around 1999-2001, it was not a close third behind C (or C++).

At that time, on those machines, the gap between programs written in C and programs written in Java was about the same as the gap right now between programs written in Java and programs written in pure Python.

pjmlp8• 1 year ago

And yet many of us embraced Java, it became the chosen language to teach distributed systems in many Portuguese universities around 1998, because of the pain to write portable C or C++ code across UNIX clones.

A mix of K&R C, C89, C++ARM compilers catching up with WG21 work, POSIX flavours, and lovely autoconf scripts.

int_19h13• 1 year ago

I don't think that's accurate. Java at the time you're describing was already JIT-compiled (HotSpot debuted in 1999), which made it drastically faster than any plain bytecode interpreter. OTOH Python was - and remains - notoriously slow because, despite being compiled to bytecode, said bytecode is extremely high level and many opcodes in it represent potential numerous dict lookups etc.

javier2• 1 year ago

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable

This is something I greatly value with the recent changes to Java. They found a great way to include sealed classes, switch expression, project Loom, records that feels at home in the existing Java syntax.

The tooling with heap dump analyzers, thread dump analyzers, GC analyzers is also top notch.

aardvark179• 1 year ago

I think Gavin Bierman is an unsung hero as far as steering the Java language is concerned. I had the privilege to sit next to him in the office when I was working on TruffleRuby, and our conversations on language design were always elucidating, and his ability to gently steer others away from pitfalls was something I wish I could do as well.

Hearing the work he and others did to gradually introduce pattern matching without painting themselves into a corner was fascinating and inspiring.

neonsunset8• 1 year ago

a close 3rd place behind C/CPP

Not anymore, the competition is doing much better these days.

hintymad3• 1 year ago

And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc),

Java's tools are really top notch. Using IntelliJ for Java feels a whole new different world from using IDEs for other languages.

Speaking of Go, does anyone know why Go community is not hot on developing containers for concurrent data structures? I see Mutex this and lock that scattering in Go code, while in Java community the #1 advice on writing concurrency code is to use Java's amazing containers. Sometimes, I do miss the java.util.concurrent and JCTools.

zwnow• 1 year ago

Just implement concurrency with actors and u save up on some locks and mutexes...

The patterns are available, its up to the community to apply proper concurrency patterns.

eikenberry2• 1 year ago

It's a core principle.

    Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.

The overuse of Mutex and Lock are from developers bringing along patterns from other language where they are used to communicating via shared memory. So this aspect of the language just doesn't click as well for many people at first. How long it takes you to get it depends on your experience.

shanemhansen• 1 year ago

I'll offer a counterpoint to the responses. Until go got generics, concurrent data structures were awkward. The stdlib now does include things like sync.Map.

In fact my experience has been that overuse of channels is a code smell that alot of new go developers fall into and later regret. There's a reason the log package uses a mutex for synchronization.

In general I think channels are great for connecting a few large chunks of your program together. Concurrency is great but also not every function call benefits from being turned into a distributed system.

I think that it would be a great idea to develop more concurrent go data structures with generics and I suspect inertia is what's keeping the community from doing it.

My credentials such as the are: been writing go since 1.0. worked at Google and taught go classes as well as owned some of the original go services (the downloads server aka payload server).

interleave• 1 year ago

I miss writing Java 1.4 with Eclipse and svn. Even though I am also super-happy with Ruby and Swift today, I know that control-space flow. Good times!

Edit: 1.4, not 1.7

Thaxll• 1 year ago

Java is not ahead of Go, they're on part but often Go is faster while using 2-10x less memory. Value type makes optimization much easier in Go.

The fact that you specifically mention Go explains a lot. btw c# is faster than Java, so not third place, it's more a 5th~

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

9999000009992• 1 year ago

Doing what?

Benchmarks aren’t all that useful since usually the bottleneck is File IO, external api calls, db calls, user latency or a combo of the 4.

Go’s main advantage in this matchup would be conciseness.

Go code looks so clean and nice, Java doesn’t.

I personally don’t care for Java, but I have bills so it’s always in my back pocket. Things happen , sometimes you need to write Java to eat.

“Fred, you really should just take the job.”

“Martha you don’t understand, it’s Java with an Oracle DB.”

“Fred, I know it’s bad, I know you still have nightmares about the 4 types of string in Java 8, but it’s not just us now.”

With a tear in his eye , fear in his heart.

“Martha, if I must… I’ll open Eclipse once more.”

emmelaich• 1 year ago

As an SRE, I appreciate the JVM. Out of memory is now the developers problem not mine / the machine's.

Only have to deal with gigalines of log4j excreta filling up disks.

thomashabets22• 1 year ago

I know many SREs who basically became full time JVM herders. That thing is a nightmare.

But if your organization doesn't assign that work to you, then sure, it's not your problem.

pjmlp8• 1 year ago

And, alongside C# for historical reasons, the closest we got in mainstream to the whole Xerox PARC ideals of what a developer workstation is supposed to be like.

KronisLV2• 1 year ago

I really like the JetBrains IDEs, both for Java and .NET, it feels way more pleasant to write code and refactor it than just in something like Visual Studio Code (which still feels better for utility scripts). They have pretty good run profiles that you can put in your repo, pretty good debugger, plenty of suggestions/inspections and customizability.

Java, .NET and languages like that also lend themselves pretty well to tools (and even LLMs) understanding what's going on, their runtimes are pretty good and platform differences don't give you too many issues from what I've seen. Though when it comes to the frameworks or libraries you might use (e.g. how often you will see the likes of Spring Boot in enterprise projects) will definitely leave some performance on the table [1] and have plenty of awkward and confusing situations along the way [2], especially if you're unlucky enough to have to work on codebases that have been around for over a decade. Old Java projects really suck sometimes, though maybe that applies to many of the old projects, regardless of tech.

Overall, I quite like them and am pretty productive, plus I unironically think that using Maven is pleasant enough (even adding custom repos isn't too convoluted [3]) and the modern approach of self contained .jar files that can just be run with a JDK install instead of separately having to manage Tomcat or GlassFish (or TomEE or Payara nowadays, I guess) is a step in the right direction!

Though while I do like packages such as Apache Commons and they're very useful, I also very much enjoy using something like Go more recently, it's easier to get started making simple web apps with it, less ceremony and overhead, more just getting to writing code.

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=z...

[2] https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/it-works-on-my-docker (a short rant of mine, but honestly I very much prefer when you have configuration done explicitly in the code, not some layered abstractions with cryptic failure modes; Dropwizard is way nicer in that regard than Spring Boot)

[3] https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-multiple-reposito... and https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-mirror-settings.h...

igouy7• 1 year ago

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Of course, rank depends on what we include or exclude from the rankings, for example:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

:versus:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

lkuty• 1 year ago

I am wondering what was the role of Guy L. Steele in the creation of Java if he had any. From the article, it looks like it was Gosling alone. I did not cheat by checking on Wikipedia

steelbird• 1 year ago

He worked on it after, no?

neom• 1 year ago

James Gosling, Robert Pike and Geoffrey Hinton are my top 3 "Canadians who meaningfully changed things in technology" (tho, I should probably make it a top 5, add Brian Kernighan and figure out someone else)

cmrdporcupine• 1 year ago

Kenneth Iverson (APL) could be your fifth even if none of us use APL, its reputation and influence is probably deeper than we realize

badcryptobitch• 1 year ago

If Robert Pike is on your list, maybe Graydon Hoare should be 5th place!

toprerules5• 1 year ago

I admire Java as a success story, but I still have a deeply ingrained aversion to it for many reasons. I will admit that many of the reasons are due to Java's legacy as the language of bloated corporations, and its creation of overly verbose, magic fueled frameworks and poorly written code. Java as a language goes hand in hand with the idea that code is coal to be shoveled into the furnace, and we should all throw our aspirations away and embrace mediocrity.

My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA with standard ops tools like strace, gdb, etc. The JVM's over allocation of memory robs the kernel of real insight as to how the workload is actually performing. When you use the JVM, you are completely locked in and god help you if there isn't a JVM expert to debug your thing and unravel how it translates to a platform implementation.

Then of course there's the weird licensing, it's association with Oracle, managing JDK versions, it's lack of it factor in 2025, and a huge boatload of legacy holding it back (which is not unique to Java).

I have successfully navigated my career with minimal exposure to Java, and nowadays there's a glut of highly performant languages with GC that support minimal runtimes, static compilation, and just look like regular binaries such that the problems solved by something like the Java or Python VMs just aren't as relevant anymore - they just add operational complexity.

To reiterate, I admire JG just like any tech person should. Java's success is clear and apparent, but I'm glad I don't have to use it.

the_overseer• 1 year ago

IT factor! Am I on a fashion website now? What kind of argument is that? Also, why on earth would you use strace or gdb for Java? It has enormously performant debugging tools in the JDK. Also, IDE debugging integration is second to none.

toprerules5• 1 year ago

Because if I'm debugging a critical issues and wading through multiple layers of processes and system interactions, I don't want to have to learn a bespoke toolkit and debugging system for every single process.

bitwize5• 1 year ago

"It" factor affects talent pool size. If you're planning a large project and want to hire talent to staff it, how popular a language and framework you choose to implement it in has a direct effect on the cost of implementation. Hint: popular languages and frameworks are far easier to hire for than obscure ones, so unless you have a VERY GOOD REASON not to, it's best to choose a popular language.

exabrial5• 1 year ago

My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA

Java has one the greatest debugging capabilities ever. dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a debugger to connect before starting. There is no equivalent in any other language that does _all_ of these things. And to top this off, there is 0 equivalent to Idea or Eclipse for any other language.

For runtime dynamics, JMX/JConsole is good enough for daily use, Java Flight Recorder gives you deep insight, or in a system you don't have direct access to. Hell even running jstack on a JVM is a good debug tool. If those don't do the trick, there's plain old HPROF (similar to other languages) and Eclipse Memory Analyzer.

Then of course there's the weird licensing,

The JVM is open source. There are no licensing issues. OpenJDK can be freely downloaded and run in production without restrictions on any use. If you really want to buy a JVM from Oracle... well thats your prerogative.

it's lack of it factor in 2025,

sdkman

a huge boatload of legacy holding it back

what legacy code?

marginalia_nu2• 1 year ago

what legacy code?

The Java API has its fair deal of baggage due to its extreme backward compatibility. Boolean.getBoolean[1] is one of the more accessible examples of a bad API that exists only because of legacy reasons, but there quite a number of them.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Boolean....

int_19h13• 1 year ago

dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a debugger to connect before starting. There is no equivalent in any other language that does _all_ of these things

.NET + C# can do all of these things.

throwaway77833• 1 year ago

In my 20+ years using java, not once have I used strace or gdb. Java itself has fantastic debugger support, and IDEs have built in step through capabilities.

Mentioning Java and Python in the same way in the context of performance is really odd. Python is nowhere near the JVM when it comes to performance

toprerules5• 1 year ago

It sounds like you've only ever written code without dealing with it in production. You can't always plug your code into an IDE when your debugging someone else's JVM app on a remote server.

briankelly4• 1 year ago

The tooling is pretty easy to learn if scary looking at first and becoming a JVM expert, at least in the context of GC tuning, might take you a week or less. Some of the defaults are surprising though.

And I think there is some parallel with the kernel vs GC and mmap vs buffer pools - the GC simply has better context in the scope of the application. With other processes in the picture, though, yeah there is some provisioning complexity there.

cgh2• 1 year ago

Debugging Java is great, as others have mentioned. This includes probably the best remote debugging capabilities available for any platform.

OpenJDK, the de facto standard version used by everyone, is licensed under the GPL version 2 with the classpath exception.

No offence, but you simply aren’t well informed.

jjav3• 1 year ago

My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA

You state how you don't really use java, but the above confirms it.

Java debugging and diagnostic tooling is second to none.

toprerules5• 1 year ago

That's a really narrow view of the world, and I think another Javaism to think that Java is the entire world. Today's multi-service deployments run tens if not hundreds of auxiliary processes not using Java. They use network overlays that change how processes interact with the network core. A person who is debugging a knock on effect issues has to be able to look through many different layers of processes, many of which are written in C, C++, Go, etc. Having to learn an entire toolset to debug Python or Java is a huge burden and it makes introspection extremely difficult. Java essentially wants to be the entire platform, which isn't how the world works anymore.

aabajian• 1 year ago

Just going to remind y'all of this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

I went to a Java school. I remember my operating systems class involved writing simulated OS code in Java (for example, round robin for context switching). The argument was that it would be easier to understand the algorithms if the hardware complexities were minimized. I understand that sentiment, but I don't think Java was the right choice. Python would have accomplished the same task even better (understanding algorithms). I think there was a huge influence from industry to teach college students Java from day one. I had taught myself BASIC and some C back in high school, so it was a bit of a step backwards to learn a high-level language just to do simulated low-level OS programming.

cbm-vic-202• 1 year ago

A lot of the arguments Joel makes in that article also apply to Python, and pretty much any other higher-level language that doesn't make you think about pointers. Ironically, he points out the Google had a great leap over Microsoft with MapReduce, which was built in Java.

jonhohle3• 1 year ago

Back in the early 2000s, I was taught in C, C++, Motorola 68HC11, and MIPs assembly. I can clearly understand how Java works, even if I don’t know its GC is implemented. I can understand how programs were written from the 80s to currently. Had I learned programming in Java or, worse, Python, I doubt I’d have the same understanding. It’s relatively easy to go from low level to high level languages if you’re willing to give up control. My experience is that the opposite is less true. It’s certainly possible, but not as straightforward as understanding some foundational ideas.

telotortium• 1 year ago

The original version of MapReduce was written in C++. The successor library, Flume, was however written in Java, but Spolsky would certainly have been referring to the original MapReduce, since the Flume paper wasn't published until 2010.

briankelly4• 1 year ago

My school started us off in microcontroller programming in C then Java for intro to data structures and OOP then back to C (and MIPS assembly) for systems/OS/concurrency. One thing I appreciate Java over Python for DS/Algo is the clear delineation between abstract data type and underlying data structure - IMO is easy to get a wrong mental model with Python. But teaching OS concepts in Java seems a little crazy to me.

Koshkin2• 1 year ago

Hm... Why? Java seems to be a perfect language in which to understand things at a conceptual level!

PathOfEclipse• 1 year ago

I've been working in .NET/C# for the past few years, and while I'm happy with it, I still think the JVM/Java are the best ecosystem overall I've worked in. It's amazing how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong.

For instance, Java introduced the fork/join pool for work stealing and recommended it for short-lived tasks that decomposed into smaller tasks. .NET decided to simply add work-stealing to their global thread pool. The result: sync-over-async code, which is the only way to fold an asynchronous library into a synchronous codebase, frequently results in whole-application deadlocks on .NET, and this issue is well-documented: https://blog.stephencleary.com/2012/07/dont-block-on-async-c...

Notice the solution in this blog is "convert all your sync code to async", which can be infeasible for a large existing codebase.

There are so many other cases like this that I run into. While there have been many mistakes in the Java ecosystem they've mostly been in the library/framework level so it's easier to move on when people finally realize the dead end. However, when you mess up in the standard library, the runtime, or language, it's very hard to fix, and Java seems to have gotten it more right here than anywhere else.

MarkSweep• 1 year ago

The thread pool starvation problem in .NET is annoying when you encounter it. Personally I have not bumped into since the .NET framework days.

The thread pool implementation has been tweaked over the years to reduce the impact of this problem. The latest tweak that will be in .NET 10:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/112796

I’m not sure a thread pool implementation can immune to misuse (many tasks that synchronously block on the completion of other tasks in the pool). All you can do is add more threads or try to be smarter about the order tasks are run. I’m not a thread pool expert, so I might have no idea what I’m talking about.

deepsun2• 1 year ago

Interesting. I'm not a .Net programmer, but I always thought .Net takes winning approach from Java ecosystem and adopts it. Java approaches/frameworks are kinda pioneering and competing, while .Net follows and grabs the best. So instead of competing approaches/frameworks (like ORMs for example) .Net has only one, the best one, well adopted and used by everyone there.

But reading your message it doesn't sound like it.

geodel• 1 year ago

Growing up with “pretty close to zero money,”

Zero money programmers >> Zero interest rate programmers :-)

snovymgodym2• 1 year ago

Java, especially modern Java, is a fine language. The JVM is an awesome runtime. I'm tired of pretending it isn't.

tstrimple• 1 year ago

The vast majority of Java developers will never touch modern Java and have zero idea of its features or capabilities. I'm in the process of migrating literally thousands of servers and tens of thousands of apps to the cloud and there isn't anything close to modern Java. The absolute majority at this client seems to be Java 8 and there isn't a single Java 17 or newer. So it's one thing to have great modern features. But if you're going to be a Java developer it'll take work / luck to actually be able to use decent versions of it. Very similar story with C++. If you're on a great cutting edge team, you might be able to use the shiny new stuff. But more than likely you'll be relegated to some C++11 at the latest.

I haven't seen things quite so bad on the .NET side at this client. Yes there's a ton of legacy ASP.NET apps. But there are also a lot of .NET Core apps. They haven't quite made it to the post Core versions of .NET, but it's still a healthier state than I see with Java. I guess all of this to say that modern versions of "ancient" programming languages are great and really do improve things. But chances are if you're working with an ancient programming language you'll be stuck maintaining legacy shit and won't ever get to utilize the shiny stuff.

This is keeping in mind that your average programmer will never even try to interview for FAANG never mind grind leetcode and programming language trivia for weeks like seems so common here.

FromTheSteppe2• 1 year ago

Well to be fair, if you wanted Performance, Linux support, and a framework which was built with dependency injection and async support in mind and not just have them as patched in footguns, you had to migrate to .NET Core. A Java 8 Spring app was just good enough.

vips7L9• 1 year ago

This just anecdotal evidence of your one client. Every statistic I’ve seen shows that at least half is on a runtime > 8, with most in that half being on 17 or 21. My entire company runs on 21 and will be moving to 25 when it’s out.

kaliszad• 1 year ago

The java.net.Inet4Address and Inet6Address could be more lightweight.

For a simple IPv4 address normally representable using 4 bytes/ 32 bits Java uses 56 bytes. The reason for it is Inet4Address object takes 24 B and the InetAddressHolder object takes another 32 B. The InetAddressHolder can contain not only the address but also the address family and original hostname that was possibly resolved to the address.

For an IPv6 address normally representable using 16 bytes/ 128 bits Java uses 120 bytes. An Inet6Address contains the InetAddressHolder inherited from InetAddress and adds an Inet6AddressHolder that has additional information such as the scope of the address and a byte array containing the actual address. This is an interesting approach especially when compared to the implementation of UUID, which uses two longs for storing the 128 bits of data.

Java's approach is causing 15x overhead for IPv4 and 7.5x overhead for IPv6 which seems excessive. What am I missing here? Can or should this be streamlined?

dmurray• 1 year ago

What a wonderfully HN response to a biographical piece on James Gosling.

For my part, most of the Java code that I have written that needs to use IP addresses needs somewhere between 1 and 10 of them, so I'd never notice this overhead. If you want to write, like, a BGP server in Java I guess you should write your own class for handling IP addresses.

LtWorf9• 1 year ago

Java is fast as long as you have near infinite RAM. When you don't it starts breaking apart.

The whole fixation of java developers to abstract things leads to countless virtual calls that are actually very slow at runtime.

klim2media• 1 year ago

My biggest gripe with Java is the only really viable IDE option is from a for-profit company and that it routinely gobbles up my RAM. I used Eclipse and Netbeans back in the day but IntelliJ is superior before it becomes unusable.

whartung3• 1 year ago

Ode to Java. Boy, I love Java. When I switched jobs way back, a condition was that the new project was going be using Java.

GC. Single file modules. No "forward". The Collection suite. Fast compiles.

The magic of the ClassLoader. The ClassLoader, that was insightful. I don't know how much thought went into that when they came up with it, but, wow. That ClassLoader is behind a large swath of Java magic. It really hasn't changed much over time, but boy is it powerful.

When I started Java, I started it because of the nascent Java web stack of the day. Early servlets and JSP. I picked because of two things. One, JSPs were just Servlets. A JSP was compiled down into a Servlet, and shazam, Servlet all the way down. Two, single language stack. Java in JSPs, Java in Servlets. Java in library code. Java everywhere. In contrast to the MS ASP (pre .NET) world.

Mono-language meant my page building controller folks could talk to my backend folks and share expertise. Big win.

Servlets were a great model. Filters were easy and powerful. Free sessions. Free database connection pools in the server. I mean, we had that in '98, '99.

And, of course, portability. First project was using Netscapes server, which was spitting up bits 2 weeks before we went live, so we switched to JRun in a day or two (yay standard-ish things...). Then, Management(tm) decided "No, Sun/Oracle, we're going NT/SQL Server". Oh no. But, yup, transitioned to that in a week. Month later, CTO was fired, and we went back to Sun/Oracle.

Java EE had a rough start, but it offered a single thing nobody else was offering. Not out of the box. Not "cheap", and that was a transaction manager, and declarative transactions on top of that. We're talking about legit "Enterprise grade" transaction manager. Before you had Tuxedo, or MS MTS. Not cheap, not "out of the box", not integrated. JBoss came out and gave all that tech away. Then Sun jumped on with early, free, Sun Java Enterprise 8 which begat Glassfish which was open source. Glassfish was amazing. Did I mention that the included message queues are part and parcel of the integrated, distributed transaction model for Java EE? Doesn't everyone get to rollback their message queue transactions when their DB commit fails? Message Driven Beans, sigh, warms my heart.

There were certainly some bad decisions in early Java EE. The component model was far too flexible for 95% of the applications and got in the way of the Happy Path. Early persistence (BMP, CMP) was just Not Good. We punted on those almost right away and just stuck with Session Beans for transaction management and JDBC. We were content with that.

The whole "everything is remote" over CORBA IIOP and such. But none of that really lasted. EJB 3 knocked it out of the park with local beans, annotations in lieu of XML, etc. Introduction of the JPA. Modern Jakarta EE is amazing, lightweight, stupid powerful (and I'm not even talking Spring, that whole Other Enterprise Stack). There's lots of baggage in there, you just don't have to use it. JAX-RS alone will take you VERY far. Just be gentle, Java Enterprise offers lots and lots of rope.

None of this speaks to the advances in the JVM. The early HotSpot JIT was amazing. "Don't mind me, I'm just going to seamlessly sneak in some binary compiled code where that stack machine stuff was a nano-second ago. I've been watching it, this is better. Off you go!" Like presents from Santa. The current rocket ship that in JDK development (this is good and bad, I still do not like the Java 9 JPMS module stuff, I think it's too intrusive for the vast majority of applications). But OpenJDK, the Graal stuff. Sheesh, just get all light headed thinking about it.

Along with the JVM we have the JDK, its trivial install. Pretty sure I have, like, 20 of them installed on my machine. Swapped out with a PATH and JAVA_HOME change. The JVM is our VM, the Servlet container is our container. Maven is our dependency manager. Our WAR files are self-contained. And all that doesn't go stomping on our computer files like Paul Bunyan and Blue making lakes in Minnesota.

It's no wonder I was struggling to grok all the talk about VMs, Dockers, and containers and all that stuff folks mess with to install software. We never had to deal with that. It just was not an issue.

I can distribute source code, with a pom.xml, and a mvnw wrapper script, and anyone can build that project with pretty much zero drama. Without breaking everything on their system. And whatever IDE they're using can trivially import that project. It's also fast. My current little project, > 10K lines of code, < 3s to clean/build/package.

Obviously, there's always issues. The Stories folks hear are all true. The legacy stuff, the FactoryInterfaceFactoryImpl stuff. The Old Days. It's all real. It's imperfect.

But, boy, is it impressive. (And, hey, portable GUI folks, Java FX is pretty darn good...)

kccqzy• 1 year ago

The servlet really is a powerful concept behind a bad name. I've seen more than once where people reinvent servlets in other languages.

Koshkin2• 1 year ago

Also, λs and μservices...

palmfacehn• 1 year ago

Seconded. I'm still using the Servlet API without drama. I click away as soon as I see a package that requires containers to install.

theanonymousone• 1 year ago

I have heard it about the situation in 1995, but it probably also holds to a good extent now: You appreciate Java (only) after you have experienced/experience other languages.

kazinator• 1 year ago

Mr. Gosling; please hunt down and release the source code for Ace: a syntax-driven C preprocessor.

You can keep the Java, thanks.

w10-1• 1 year ago

Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.

Even as early as Java 1.1 and 1.2 he was not particularly involved in making runtime, library, or even language decisions, and later he wasn't the key to generics, etc.

Mark Reinhold has been the hand's-on lead since 1.1, first integrating early JIT's, HotSpot, the 1.2 10X class explosion, and has been running the team all the way through Oracle's purchase, making the JVM suitable for dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure, open-sourcing, moving to a faster release cadence, pushing JVM method and field handles that form the basis for modern language features, migrating between GC's, and on and on.

As far as I can tell, everything that makes Java great has come down to Mark Reinhold pushing and guiding.

elric• 1 year ago

The whole core team is amazing. Gosling wanted a language that was practical from a development POV. Over the years, it's been refined into a language with a fair amount of mechanical sympathy on top of the development experience. Thanks to folks like Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz.

I have no love for Oracle the big bad company. But I am deeply greatful they've managed to keep that group moving forward.

selfhoster• 1 year ago

Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.

That's like saying Linus was only the spark for git because he spent two weeks hacking it from scratch.

The whole world uses git now.

billmcneale• 1 year ago

dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure,

Kotlin is not a dynamic language, it's statically typed, just like Java.

rootbear• 1 year ago

When Gosling was at Sun, he was one of two principal architects of the NeWS Window system. The X Window system was designed for "dumb" display devices and so the display elements were all static, not requiring much work from the server. NeWS was designed to run on a (Sun) workstation, where there was a lot of computational power available, so it was based on Postscript. A NeWS client would send a program to the server, not just static commands.

Gosling, unsurprisingly, designed Java with the NeWS model in mind, where web pages were programs, not just static HTML documents. When I got him to sign my copy of "The Java Programming Language", I asked him if Java was the revenge of NeWS. He just smiled.

AStonesThrow• 1 year ago

The corollary of this was Display PostScript. At my first job we had a SPARCStation 2 with a SPARCprinter. The SPARCStation was a mighty wonder to behold, with a storage pedestal and a lovely OpenWindows GUI on a luxurious Sun monitor and color framebuffer. The operator sitting at the desk was often just a novice clerical worker, but we ran a few Internet services on the machine as well. However, our department depended on that SPARCprinter to spit out hundreds of sheets of paper daily.

We could not depend on the printer to stay functional, though. Have you heard of a Winmodem? SPARCprinters were essentially that: they were configured as a "dumb display device" where all the imaging logic was contained in the software and run on the server. A page was written in PostScript, rendered on the print server, and dispatched to the printer as if it were a framebuffer/monitor.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the server software was not so reliable, or the printer hardware wasn't reliable, and because of this peculiar symbiotic parasitism, whenever our printer wedged, our server was also toast. Every process went into "D" for device wait; load averages spiked and all our work ground to a halt. We would need to pull the worker off the desktop, reboot the whole server, and start over with the printer.

That printer haunted my dreams, all though my transition from clerk, to network operator, to sysadmin, and it wasn't until 2011 when I was able to reconcile with printers in general. I still miss SunOS 4 and the whole SPARC ecosystem, but good riddance to Display PostScript.

bitwize5• 1 year ago

Just as we have a modern successor to X in Wayland, we also have a modern successor to NeWS: the browser with JavaScript, with PWAs and Electron providing a smoother desktop integration.

I wonder what Gosling thinks of the fact that NeWS ultimately won in the end, even on Microsoft systems.

nelup20• 1 year ago

I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).

It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.

sapiogram• 1 year ago

My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.

overfeed• 1 year ago

The reason I prefer the Go ecosystem to Java is cultural, rather than technical. Sure, the JVM is very impressive and the language has been evolving, but the culture around Java seems to encourage needless complexity.

Of all the languages I've had to work with trying to get to know unfamiliar code-bases, it's the Go codebases I've been quickest to grok, and yielded the fewest surprises since as the code I'm looking for is almost always where I expect it to be.

arccy• 1 year ago

funny. java is known for its stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together to see the whole thing and it still doesn't tell you anything useful about why the app crashed.

bdangubic• 1 year ago

same! mid-way through my almost 3 decade career I got bored and thought lets try some non-JVM projects, for 2 years I took projects using other languages etc… worse two years of my career :)

bsaul10• 1 year ago

Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development.

Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method with such a horrible signature that i never can be sure. in the end i recoded the thing with macros instead).

The feeling of typesafety is satisfying , i agree. But calling the overall experience a "joy" ?

mynameisash• 1 year ago

I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime,
recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug

With respect, at two months, you're still in the throes of the learning curve, and it seems highly unlikely you've found a compiler bug. Most folks (myself included) struggled for a few months before we hit the 'joyful' part of Rust.

asa4005• 1 year ago

I'm not discounting your experience, or saying you're wrong or anything like that. I've been writing Rust for a while, and for me, that feeling went away. Lifetime/ownership problems used to run me over but it almost never happens anymore. I think Rust has a rather severe "hump" that a lot of people run headlong into, but it does get better, I promise you. You start thinking in ownership/borrowing terms and it just fades into the background at some point. Rust is easily my most productive language now. Again, not discounting your experience at all, it can be rough starting out.

worik4• 1 year ago

I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime

Rust has a horrid learning curve

I've programmed for decades in many languages, and I felt the same as you

Persevere.

Surrender! to compile

Weather the ferocious storm

You will find, true bliss

treyd3• 1 year ago

You eventually learn you leverage lifetimes. You just need to get over that point in the learning curve. I very rarely run into those types of issues, and it's very freeing knowing that I can write libraries that are so hard to misuse because you can leverage the type system.

And macros are a part of that!

deepsun2• 1 year ago

My opinion on that is the projects scale. Typically people came from a 10+ year Java project of 100+ engineers, to a greenfield advanced hello-world -- of course it's going to feel better and more productive.

Also, as open-source folks say, "rewrite is always better". It also serves as a good security review. But companies typically don't have resources to do complete rewrites every so often, I saw it only in Google.

sabellito2• 1 year ago

I've worked in 3 of the biggest rails codebases in the world (Shopify being the last) and I can say from experience that rails legacy monoliths are infinitely worse to work with than some awful, but harmless, sea of struts XML legacy.

kllrnohj3• 1 year ago

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it)

But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

echelon2• 1 year ago

That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble.

Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open.

Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it.

The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.

jayd162• 1 year ago

Its actually quietly very popular in very boring contexts outside of Silicon Valley. Its also slowly entering new areas now that Linux builds are rock solid.

MS does have an uphill PR battle though.

bsaul10• 1 year ago

Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.

watwut2• 1 year ago

Definitely not. All the stuff I was used to get for free and advice I that was one google search away ... just dont exist in dotnet. Or is expensive. But most of the time, there is weaker library not doing nearly enough and that is all that exists.

dagw• 1 year ago

nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity

C# is extremely popular in all kinds of 'boring' industries. Having worked in areas like logistics and civil engineering, C# is everywhere.

nextos• 1 year ago

C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky.

Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.

breadwinner10• 1 year ago

One area where C# really messed up is exception handling.

See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

wokkel• 1 year ago

It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.

astura• 1 year ago

C# isn't popular in startups for the same reason Java isn't, it's "boring."

It's an extremely common language in "boring" companies doing "boring" (but profitable) work.

astrange4• 1 year ago

But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it.

I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.

throw1235435• 1 year ago

Depends where you work. I've seen a lot of Java and .NET jobs around where I am. Having both jobs I find it easier to get performant code in .NET than Java (reified generics, value types, more primitives/less boxing in general, and other constructs not found in Java)

watwut2• 1 year ago

Same here. I started to really like java after working with js/ts on small to medium project. I started to love java after working in on medium to little big project.

kubb• 1 year ago

Worth remembering how much marketing effort and money there was in pushing Java in the 90s:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NVuTBL09Dn4

jcadam• 1 year ago

Been coding on the JVM for a good chunk of my career. Though the last several years has been in languages other than Java - Scala, Clojure (my personal favorite), and Kotlin.

Finally managed to get a job offer (after being unemployed for a bit) doing Python. It's starting to look like demand for JVM experience is beginning to wane. Might be time to move on anyway :shrug:

I'm old... as long as there's a steady paycheck involved, I'll code in whatever language you say.

Though, currently working on a little personal project in Scala. :)

throwaway77833• 1 year ago

Java stagnated for a while, but has now picked up steam. With things like GraalVM, the stellar ecosystem, generally very good performance and changes to the language, it is more and more pleasant to use.

It may not be cool to use Java for startups, but we do and are immensely productive with it.

zombiwoof• 1 year ago

Legend

rr808• 1 year ago

Java is completely revitalized now and is my favorite platform.

The main problem is the legacy code and attitude out there, dependency injection, using Spring or Spring Boot etc SUCKS. VertX is/was good but now with virtual threads you dont need all the async complexity.

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

Gosling also developed a version of Emacs back in the early 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

"Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not."

lysace• 1 year ago

The JVM was the first VM I got to know, at uni in like 1996 or so. Had fun building stuff using the Jasmin "assembler". Seems like it's on Github now: https://github.com/davidar/jasmin

Jasmin was written because, at the time that we wrote the Java Virtual Machine book for O'Reilly, Sun had not published an assembler format for the Java virtual machine.
Generating a binary Java .class file is pretty fiddly. Its like creating an a.out (or .exe) file by hand. Even using a Java package like JAS (a Java API for creating class files, used internally by Jasmin and written by KB Sriram), you need to know a lot about the philosophy of the Java Virtual Machine before you can write something at the Virtual Machine level and generate a Java class.
We wanted something that made it very easy for a student or programmer to explore the Java Virtual Machine, or write a new language which targets the VM, without getting into the details of constant pool indices, attribute tables, and so on.

voidhorse• 1 year ago

The java ecosystem is great, and the JVM does deserve the appellation of technical marvel, Java the language on the other hand...questionable.

Many of Java's novel language choices have proven unfavorable in the long run (e.g. everything is a class, and even its syntax was needlessly verbose and ceremonious from day one) and all of what makes it a halfway decent language these days are good ideas that originated in other languages, often eons ago, which Java, for some reason, often elects to rebrand with its own terminology.

That said, the maintainers also do a phenomenal job managing the evolution of the language and preserving compatibility, but from a pure programming language design standpoint it's largely a messy amalgam of great ideas from a bunch of other places awkwardly realized. Great, robust ecosystem, great platform, great management, mediocre language design.

dreamcompiler2• 1 year ago

Java frustrates the absolute shit out of me. An objectively terrible language coupled with insanely great garbage collectors, insanely great JIT compilers, and insanely great IDEs.

Why couldn't we have had these things for Lisp?* I mean, if 1/1000 of the intellectual horsepower that's been thrown at Java had been thrown at Lisp, we'd all be driving to work in orbit-capable flying cars that used a teaspoon of fuel per year.

* Of course Lisp invented the insanely great IDE around 1984 but then everybody forgot about it and had to rediscover the idea 30 years later.

asa4005• 1 year ago

Clojure is around and still going strong! I mean the IDE experience is probably not what you're describing, but you can use the JVM with a mature, productive Lisp language.

dreamcompiler2• 1 year ago

Fair point.

To me, Clojure is an "almost-lisp" because of its lack of cons cells, its use of all the brackets on the keyboard, and its dependence on the JVM which can't do tail jumps.

I love Common Lisp because it compiles down to the metal and you can write code with it that starts instantly and runs very fast.

But all the above is more about personal taste than anything else, so maybe I should try Clojure again.

pjmlp8• 1 year ago

Gosling primarily uses the NetBeans IDE for development, praising its open source, Apache-licensed nature and dedicated community. He expresses frustration with developers who cling to outdated tools: “The thing that drives me nuts the most are people who are madly grasping the ’80s or the ’70s — people who still want to use Vi, which was high-tech in the ’70s.”

From one of the key developers in the Emacs history, and genesis.

He moved on, others keep trying to live in the past.

lycopodiopsida6• 1 year ago

Modern stacks (as in go and rust) are largely editor agnostic - it is Gosling who lives in the past, thinking that an IDE is still required(and a very weak one, in case of abandoned Netbeans). One of the reasons, btw, why I would take Go over Java in a heartbeat.

pjmlp8• 1 year ago

There is hardly anything modern about Go, a rebranded Limbo with with anti-intelectuals mentality.

As for Rust, there is a reason the large majority is either on VSCode or RustRover.

vips7L9• 1 year ago

You don’t need an IDE for Java either. You can use vscode or neovim, the language server will work just fine. I’ve done both, but eventually moved back to idea (with ideavim).

Kwpolska3• 1 year ago

He's living in the past, using an IDE that was high-tech in the 2000s.

pjmlp8• 1 year ago

Ah, that must be why we are getting TUI revivalism these days then.

nunobrito• 1 year ago

Oh, this marks 16 years that I'm writing Java in that case.

My only complaint is the flop with JavaFX. It should have remained as part of the JDK to replace Swing and continued development there.

Without that, Java is thrown as the forever backend platform.

Anyways: good interview.

ta12653421• 1 year ago

i can just say:

being now older (40+ ;-), i would suggest to just use the tool that gets the job done.

in todays world, this is Java or C# - while im highly advocating for the latter, because the eco system feels much more tightly integrated: i can spin up whatever application for every usecase with C# in 1 minute; also the language still evolves massivly, there is enough HR-power on the market, also .NET is now crossplatform.

the language is just elegant and very efficient, it makes the job much easier

Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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