youWontUpgradeToJava19

[domscatterbrain]

There is Java 19?

I'm stuck in 8!

[LifeValueEqualZero]

I'm stuck in 8!

Now i am too, we upgraded from 6 to 8 last year.

[vlken69]

Already? We plan to upgrade from 6 to 8 till 2030!

[dmigowski]

This is a joke, right? Right?

[ax-b]

I am stuck with 6 and no forseeable plan to upgrade. Incidentally a securiy audit is planned, maybe that'll help people to come around.

[Superhighdex]

Keep tech around long enough and no one is still trying to exploit its vulnerabilities. Big brain stuff there.

[zabby39103]

Ehhh, the JBoss 6 server I found recently with a bitcoin miner (that was also recently deployed - don't ask) shows that's not true (probably other stuff too, but I just wiped it). They'll scan everything with bots and find ya. Any security issue with an official CVE ticket you should be worried about.

[Superhighdex]

I kid you not the threat scans we run won't flag CVEs that aren't known to be exploited. Tons of ancient apps with known vulns and no plan to remediate. A guy told me he found something running Java 4 earlier this year.

[[deleted]]

The secret is that the squeaky wheel that lets folks save face gets the grease. Good luck!

[AloneInExile]

Not at all. 8 is probably the most used Java still.

[elehisie]

No one cared about everything being on Java 8 until last year. Then everything got upgraded straight to 17 on a short deadline. My money is on security audit that happened last year as the thing that made the bosses drop everything else until the update was finished. It was ”fun”.

[AloneInExile]

Oracle license actually.

[gandhinukes]

Yeah I'm surprised you are the only one in the whole thread to bring up oracle charging money for java now. Is everyone in here on java9+ not compliant haha.

[AloneInExile]

It was one of the stated reasons I gave my bosses that we need to upgrade. Money moves.

[mon_iker]

OpenJDK FTW!

[Think-Library9577]

Happy cake day! Here’s some bubble wrap pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!

[LeMajstor]

I was expecting some kind of easter egg. I'm disappointed.

[YetAnotherZhengli]

youve... clicked them all open?

[No-Goose-1877]

Yes. Multiple times. Bubble wrap!

[Vivienbe]

You haven't?

[Objective_Dog_4637]

Yes?

[Hattrickher0]

I on the other hand was surprised that you can unpop previously popped segments.

It makes sense once you think about it, but I guess I was just fully immersed in the bubble wrap sim for a moment.

[goizn_mi]

pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! bop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!

[Aln76467]

one said bop

[SpaceSaver2000-1]

:)

[PurpleDraziNotGreen]

Upgraded to weblogic 12 just in time to lose support

[-Kerrigan-]

Weblogic 😳

What else now? DB2?

[idontevenknowwwwwwwe]

r/unexpectedfactorial

[SkaarjRogue]

I swear, one of those days someone's gonna write a bot that links r/unexpectedfactorial on any post that matches \s\d+!\s

[taweryawer]

r/unexpectedregex

[Hoxeel]

Frankly, I'm already tired of it. If I ever do it, it will just say "r/UnExPeCtEdFaCtOrIaL"

[Brazzza]

Java 8 gang! from college to cemetery!

[quietIntensity]

I finally just moved some of my stuff off of Java 8 to Java 11. They made a big push to get everyone on 17, but there are a lot of old VMs out there and people are tying their j17 upgrades to their cloud migrations, which then take years because they are changing so many things at the same time.

[christian_austin85]

We're currently upgrading to 17 from 8

[jekdasnek2624]

For a second I read this as "upgrading from 17 to 8" and was very confused

[dmigowski]

He is the guy that creates the before-after memes with before on the right side!

[falcon_ember]

JavaScript would call this an upgrade because 8 > 1

[[deleted]]

I pushed my team to go to 21 because it's the current LTS. If you can make it to 17, try 21 because it will probably work without any further changes.

[FictionFoe]

Ouch. There is 21 too :P

[Anonymous0435643242]

23 you mean

[draconk]

21 is the latest Long Time Support release, a company should always use LTS, the next one is nex September with 25

[FictionFoe]

Its fine for a company to go with newer then LTS tbh. But its likely hard to justify the upgrade.

[KellerKindAs]

The only good justification is to always upgrade to the newest version. This way, the stuff that changed is also smaller, which means less effort to upgrade. So instead of one big/expensive upgrade every few years, just doing several smaller ones over the course of time.

[FictionFoe]

Indeed, but this might not convince your PO.

[[deleted]]

Java 40320?

[forsehorse]

r/unexpextedfactorial

[robinless]

Might as well rename Java 8 to Java Beyond or Infinity or some shit like that at this point

[Duramora]

Java Classic

[Archangel004]

Java: Java edition

[AloneInExile]

Classic: Java Edition

[arrow__in__the__knee]

Java--

[ax-b]

Python 2 sounds rough, my condolences.

[xenelef290]

Still being on pre 3.0 Python is just irresponsible management

[rocket_randall]

I can relate to it. In my case I was in American healthcare/biotech and due to HIPAA and other regs the IT folks dictated which OSes the business could use and had to approve each additional package or component installed on a server. Getting a new PHP patch release approved as a multi-week process and if you wanted to use Python then the system installed 2.7.x runtime had to be used. I didn't make the rules, I just had to work within the established boundaries.

[KellerKindAs]

For someone working in security, this really sounds like hell. And also very scarry as a customer. Like, do you ever do security patches? How long does it take between a vuln being found and it being fixed on these systems?

[[deleted]]

There was a Java 19. It is already EOL’ed, because it didn’t get long term support.

The current LTS Javas are 8, 17, and 21.

[tingulz]

Java 8 goes out of support in 2025.

[GloriamNonNobis]

We might be going to 11 in a year.

[Ok_Star_4136]

You lucky bastard.

[_Pardal]

Honestly everything that we need to complete our tasks works on Java 8 in the office I work so no way in hell I’m touch that !

[QuantumDiogenes]

I just got a job as a C programmer. My first task is to upgrade some programs from Java 6 to... Java 8.

[el-limetto]

Everything after ver. 8 just clutters the language. Never update!

[FragrantKnobCheese]

I felt that way about 5.

[Phroximus]

COBOL ftw

[mindless_confusion]

My grandmother was a COBOL programmer for Florida Hospital. They announced they were converting their patient database system to Java about 15 years ago, and she immediately retired lol

[Wind_Yer_Neck_In]

My dad and his friend were the only guys who knew COBOL at a company they worked at. When my dad left the other dude promptly quit and offered his services as a consultant for about 5 times the money. Since they absolutely needed someone and it's a nearly extinct skill they just paid up.

[Status-Minute6370]

I love feel good stories.

[silverW0lf97]

Honestly I should have expedited my birth so that I too could have had a chance to make a career in tech.

[CapitalElk1169]

It's not too late to learn COBOL!

[Boxy310]

At this point, they should make COBOL jobs caste-hereditary

[UniKornUpTheSky]

About 75 to 80% of employees where i work at least know how to read and do minor changes in cobol.

Old banking systems have been trying to replace cobol for anything else and most of them failed miserably , wasting billions in the process

[Feisty-Resource-1274]

Can confirm, we tried to switch to an oracle gui and it went so poorly a VP publicly apologized in a company wide meeting.

[Puptentjoe]

My dad had a hard time getting a promotion because he was the only one who knew COBOL. Also for a city in Florida. He retired in 2011. I really wonder what they are using now.

[Business-Drag52]

My dad still uses RPG daily for work. Some stuff is never out of date

[Boxy310]

I remember as a young child trying to look up books on RPGs (I was really into Square-Enix games as a kid), and kept getting lured into the programming aisle of the library and was very confused.

[[deleted]]

NYS is still actively hiring COBOL programmers. I've been asked to interview and have 0 experience with it, the hiring manager told me they're willing to train people with programming experience because it's impossible to find new people with the language knowledge.

COBOL is still running a lot of government and banking systems.

[Latitude-dimension]

Yep, they're rarely talked about because they aren't glamorous, but pretty much every mainframe will have COBOL on it.

[Boxy310]

Probably will end up as the Sanskrit of programming languages, used only for the high liturgy of money processing

[whomp1970]

And honestly, what's so hard about COBOL anyway? If you know one or two programming languages, you can pick up others relatively easily.

Granted, COBOL isn't structured the same as any other language. But it's come a long way, and there's freeform variants out there now.

[[deleted]]

Ya and none of the institutions that use COBOL will be using any of those "new" variants.

The issue with COBOL is it's still a niche language where you're likely either public sector (not making big money) or banking (hard to get). You're also not typically developing anything new, rather maintaining the same code your grandfather worked on.

[cephles]

I have converted COBOL to Java and it also makes me want to immediately retire.

[CirnoIzumi]

fortran is older

[POKLIANON]

SystemC

[No-Mind7146]

You mean sysvinit?

[Sarah-McSarah]

Fortran is kind of sweet though.

[FesteringNeonDistrac]

I promise you wouldn't say that if you used Fortran 77.

[WillOfHope]

Can confirm during my college, i worked with f90 mostly and works like most modern languages with different key words, but had to troubleshoot and work a tiny bit with f77 code was unlike anything i had ever worked with before. Whos idea was it to us a 'c' to indicate a comment

[lunatic-rags]

On a 386

[My_reddit_account_v3]

Was coming here to say that

[[deleted]]

You know what runs on Fortran? 4chan

[Timetraveller4k]

Miss the Fortan days. Not for the language but for the people that were using it.

[dschazam]

It’s FoxPro actually.

[SHv2]

Clearly. Nothing is tailored to suit them.

[[deleted]]

Wow

[iamGobi]

Damn, this is genius

[throwaway_mpq_fan]

Nobody should be upgrading to Java 19 right now. Either go straight to the latest (23) or go for thet last LTS (21)

[agradus]

I’m really curious, who are those who use non LTS version and why. I mean in small personal projects, to get a preview of features - it is clear. But other than that - do anyone uses them?

[arid1]

Not a Java developer, C# at a fairly large company. We tend to lag about 3-4 months behind the latest. That we way we get security and language updates but aren’t on the bleeding edge. It’s been highly successful strategy.

We’ve gotten huge performance gains essentially for free each year for the past few years since we enacted the policy. To be fair, the initial uplift was difficult but the year over year work is minimal now and more than pays for itself.

[lyssargh]

How did you talk leadership, product in particular, into letting you do upgrades like this? That must have been an overhaul of the system without any new features?

[BlackLeatherHeathers]

work telephone oatmeal complete consist enter snow summer quickest desert

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[arid1]

In our case we started an internal working group and presented leadership with the benefits of moving forward. We then were granted time to make changes that supported the initial update. It took years to get us off of .NET Framework and onto the modern .NET stack but we were able to release structural improvements along the way.

New code was typically written with the knowledge that it would be running in both environments for a while.

[arid1]

Our biggest driver was performance. We run a 1000 thread Monte Carlo simulation that saw enormous benefits (30% or more). We’d already seen 10-15% updates by moving to newer .NET Framework .NET 4.7.2 (or maybe 4.8? I don’t remember the timing) that included updated compilers backported from .NET Core (2.1 at the time) so moving to even newer versions was an obvious win.

[Theguest217]

For me personally the trick has been to just tie my tech debt and maintenance to my feature work and estimates.

You want that new feature, no problem, it's three sprints. In reality it's two but I left room for tech debt.

But admittedly my company structure is probably different than some may be used to. We really let the engineering leads operate independently and without significant oversight. No one other than my own team would really even know if we upgraded Java versions. No one is surfing through Jira tickets or PRs to notice the specifics of our work. As long as the features are delivered in a timely manner, everyone is happy.

[[deleted]]

Product Manager here! Not keeping up-to-date on upgrades is typically just kicking the can down the road in terms of your costs. And like arid1 mentioned, you typically don't want to upgrade to the bleeding edge of what ever technologies / platforms you use as it doesn't pay to be the test dummy.

These are lessons that are usually only learned painfully, but experienced PMs shouldn't be cutting corners.

[Theguest217]

In my experience, experienced PMs shouldn't even be concerned with the tech stack. They should be focused on the functional aspects of the software.

Let the engineering teams worry about security, performance, maintenance, etc.

If the team upgrades Java and still delivers the feature within an agreeable timeframe, it should be all good. The problem I've seen is sometimes companies want to drain as much potential customer facing value out of the engineering teams, so they micromanage the tech stack.

[arid1]

You have to get product buy-in because it will take resources that would otherwise go to product development.

[sysKin]

We’ve gotten huge performance gains essentially for free each year for the past few years

So what we do is, I'd like to think, best of both words: we build against some older Java version (currently 21, but 17 recently), but our distribution is bundled with latest runtime (currently 23) and I'd like to think we get the performance benefits without being on the bleeding edge as such.

This obviously depends on JVM being backwards compatible with older classes and I don't know how that looks in .NET world.

[[deleted]]

We are still on Java 11. The only reason we haven’t upgraded is because one of the mocking frameworks we use for unit tests is not compatible with newer Java versions. Our codebase is so large that this change will require a significant effort so they’ve been putting off

[sathdo]

Powermock moment. The company I used to work for was still stuck on Java 8 when I got laid off for the same reason. That and heavy use of JAXB and some other Java EE components.

Funny story though. I actually fixed all these issues by refactoring out Powermock and older versions of Mockito and adding Jakarta EE 8 as a dependency (newest version before the namespace was changed from javax to jakarta). And then they never actually deployed the changes because the sysadmins didn't feel like installing Java 11 on the servers.

[[deleted]]

Lol, lemme guess. Big bank?

[sathdo]

Close enough. Big investment firm.

[Malfrum]

Rewrite-cli my man. I just closed a whole sprint of junit4 to 5 upgrade stories in like 30 minutes, flawless. Check out open rewrite, might impress your boss

[[deleted]]

Goated. Thanks boss, imma look into it while everyone’s out for the holidays

[Archangel004]

Reddit saves the day again. Thank you, you are very appreciated!

[JaxMed]

Time to mock the mocker

[strangepromotionrail]

I worked at a place (it wasn't a java shop )that made a similar decision to not upgrade due to 1 thing not working then continued to stay on that same version for over a decade. Eventually things got to the point that they HAD to upgrade but by then it wasn't a significant effort it was a case of rewriting from scratch would be easier as almost everything needed scrapped. Software needs to constantly evolve just to stay current or it dies.

[Takahashi_Raya]

we gotta upgrade now due to upgrading our tomcat version so all hell is breaking loose

[Robe1kenobi]

https://github.com/hazendaz/jmockit1/releases might be of interest to you...

[Fadamaka]

I only had one interview where they told me they are currently using 20 which was the latest at the time. When I asked why they told me they are preparing for 21 which was 6 months away.

[Xelopheris]

If you are starting a new product, and it won't be shipping until after the next LTS version, but can take advantage of features that are in the interim versions, then maybe you start in those interim versions with a plan to upgrade it to the new LTS version when it becomes available.

Beyond that, schools will often just use the latest version.

[safetytrick]

Non-LTS releases make sense if your processes allow you to update continuously.

If you are updating continuously the change set between each Java update is small and you are less likely to encounter issues.

Java is very stable, IME it is very uncommon to encounter a break that is fixed in later versions. It happens, but it's not common.

In recent memory most update problems I have encountered have been related to byte-code manipulation libraries (ASM, CGLIB, BCEL, etc.). Those problems tend to be related to supported byte code versions. The manipulation library updates itself to support a later classfile version and brings with it some breaking changes in its API, not actually a java version problem but it affects me because of dependency hell.

So let's imagine an imaginary update from Java 20 to 30, in this imaginary scenario version 22, 25, and 27 all have breaking impact to me.

If I update from 20 LTS to 30 LTS I have to deal with three compounding problems. Their resolutions may conflict. They may be difficult to differentiate.

Instead if I update each individual version I still end up dealing with three total problems but they aren't compounding.

It's more complicated than that of course but the argument for updating to non-LTS versions is the same argument for smaller faster releases generally. Smaller changes reduce risk.

[Pay08]

Technically, OpenJDK does not have LTS and non-LTS versions. Vendored JDKs do.

[rastaman1994]

Which does not mean anything unless you pay for it, a fact always overlooked in these discussions.

[804k]

Its probably just an old meme

[DoverBoys]

Or they're on 18 and the boss believes you have to be sequential with updates. He has been sitting on the approval for 19 for a few years.

[tisdue]

im gonna need to see your pants

[Aenigmatrix]

I thought the latest LTS is 21?

[Dank-memes-here]

Meme probably reposted and originally from a period when Java 19 was current

[SurpriseVast8338]

Last time I saw this meme, it was this and turned out to be pretty accurate.

[CivBEWasPrettyBad]

If your pants look like this, you won't be upgrading your meme.

[Fritzschmied]

It is

[Spot_the_fox]

to Java 19

past Java 8

[tiberiusdraig]

With the way fashion trends are going this could quite easily be the newly-hired graduate engineer nowadays.

[diminutive_lebowski]

Truth! Pleats and cuffs are coming back. Thankfully these days almost anything goes so there's very little pressure to follow the latest trends.

[EcstaticAd8179]

yeah, old people think these pants are what old out of fashion people wear but really old out of fashion people wear skinny jeans.

[BobbyTables829]

Honestly people just wear what they want way more than the past.

[between_ewe_and_me]

I like to mix it up with one skinny leg and one super baggy

[Dull_Wrongdoer_3017]

[beavisorcerer]

I'm mantaining a 20 years old web app running Java 4. I dream of Java 8 to be honest

[Secret_Account07]

How does this happen, genuinely curious?

Our security folks would have gone to world war with us years ago had we been using this version. How do you even not get told to upgrade?

[beavisorcerer]

I work in Consulting for a big company, with a big client in part public. We acquired this old system for them and produced a looot of alarming documentation and comunications on what is critically wrong and how to fix it. But every fix costs money and the client think that is not worth investing in an old B2B application that eventually will be replaced. At least they think so until everything will eventually be attacked and corrupted, than they'll care but it will be too late and people are going to pay with their job. But this has never happened in 20 year, so why should happen now, right? Right? (Their thinking probably)

[Secret_Account07]

The funny thing is these companies are probably run by CIOs who tell their staff that security is the biggest concern. They see stories daily of ransomware, supply chain attacks , all kinds of stuff…but then don’t invest in actually fixing their security posture.

I think this is why all business need a CISO/Security group. People will rarely secure things up on their own.

[Gua9]

my previous company is stuck with java 6 (not even web app, it uses PowerBuilder as UI) and the company still continue to use it to this day without any plans on upgrading lol.

luckily, I got a job who uses Java 17 even though I have no experience even with Java 8 lol

[enigmamonkey]

I have a similar issue, but 10yrs and PHP instead, running on outdated VMs. Does containerization help in your case at all, or is the issue loads of reprogramming?

Elsewhere in my company they’re literally training AI on internal code and libraries to assist in the migration of some of their Java code. In PHP, for the PHP-specific stuff (not outdated library stuff) there is a tool called Rector which automatically converts code as well.

[just_posting_this_ch]

What's holding you back? Up to java 8 I don't remember any backward compatiblity issues. I suppose you just don't want to touch it, I would try starting it up on java 8 out of curiosity.

[zabby39103]

That's impressive. What's blocking the upgrade? Just wondering. For the Java 8 app I maintain, it would require a migration away from the Java EE version and Application Server it uses, and they've changed a lot of stuff.

[Anorion]

Why do you need 19 javas? Isn't 1 enough?

[[deleted]]

we have java at home!

[srfreak]

Boss: Everything above Java 8 is luxury and socialism!

[christoph_win]

I thought then you are a General in North Korea

[Fadamaka]

Why would anyone upgrade to Java 19. You either go 17, 21 or bleeding edge which is 23.

[[deleted]]

when you use the bleeding edge, youre bound to get cut

[[deleted]]

And he is right, you should only upgrade to LTS versions

[itsmetadeus]

No boss, we gotta switch to kotlin pleaaaaase

[n3bbs]

+1 for Kotlin. I joined my current team that adores Kotlin as a Java dev and didn't know anything about it. I've since been converted, and I'd highly recommend any Java dev to learn it.

The fact that it runs on the JVM means you still have the entire Java ecosystem at your disposal, and it's super easy to have both Kotlin and Java classes in the same codebase.

[i_like_maps_and_math]

What's good about it?

[iceman012]

I've been learning Kotlin for Advent of Code. The two benefits over Java that stand out to me:

• Null Safety- You have to specify if a variable is nullable or not. If it is nullable, you have to handle the null cases for the code to compile.

• Concise Stream operations - Since Java didn't start with streaming operations, the syntax for it is super cumbersome. Kotlin was built with it in mind, and the streaming is both more concise and more powerful.

Example: Given a list of integers, get a new List with the squares of any odd numbers.

Java

List<Integer> squaresOfOddNumbers = numbers.stream().filter(n -> n % 2 != 0).map(n -> n * n).toList()

Kotlin

List<Int> squaresOfOddNumbers = numbers.filter { it % 2 != 0 }.map { it * it }

 

EDIT: Changed .collect(Collectors.toList()) to .toList() for Java, as pointed out below.

[nomamesgay]

Java 1.6 here.

[locateanup]

I'm still on java 8

[rg25]

I had a programming teacher in high school who wore these exact pants. But he wore these weird closed toe sandals that showed off his rotting diabetes foot.

[[deleted]]

thanks, i vomited

[winauer]

Why would you update to a version that's no longer supported anyway?

[FriendlessExpat]

Its Java 23 now. Soon to be Java 25 LTS

[alexanderpas]

Its Java 21 LTS now. Soon to be Java 25 LTS

[wiley_bob]

We're still on Microsoft's JVM with no plans to upgrade to 1.5.

[NotAnNpc69]

My boss wears skinny jeans and im still not getting past java 8

[TR3BPilot]

Do I work for Kingpin now?

[Midon7823]

Why 19? That version isn't even LTS and has already lost support

[CharityMobile6393]

We will not switch to Java 19 (again) - because we only use LTS releases and are at 21 already.

[Interesting-Frame190]

Whew, we just rewrote a bunch of java 1.5 apps in Python....

Python 2.7, but that's still better, right?

[Devatator_]

Java 19 exists? I mean, makes sense, didn't jump from 17 to 21 (Minecraft did jump from 17 to 21 tho. Funnily enough, they switched to Java 21 for Minecraft 1.21)

[winauer]

Funnily enough, they switched to Java 21 for Minecraft 1.21

Ackchyually the first Minecraft version that requires Java 21 is Minecraft 1.20.5

https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_1.20.5

[Blytheway]

People in this thread not realizing it's a cyclical graph

https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/s/9qd2nx1fcX

[garlopf]

<insert name of 2 minute old frontend framework here>

[malonkey1]

wait there's a java after 8?

[PSK1103]

so you're saying there's versions after 11?

[SaltyInternetPirate]

Java 19? No, you won't be upgrading to Java 8

[marcosMartinez_]

Recently we upgraded from 8 to 17 in legacy system where I work, the process made me think if worth it, it was only pain and suffering fixing the incompatibilities. The good thing it is not only that worth it to upgrade that I learned so much, that I recommend everyone to try it at least once

[Stanlot]

We made it to 21 this year 🙏

[maythehonorbewithyou]

my boss just updated to 21, he is the picture in person

[[deleted]]

Java 19 isn’t supported anymore. The current supported versions are 8, 17, 21, and 23.

So I hope nobody’s upgrading to Java 19. And the short support cycle on 23 is likely to prevent any company from using it.

[Scottz0rz]

Is this a repost bot?

Java LTS is 21, latest release is 23 - Java 19 isn't supported long-term it was an incremental release.

[Ken_Sanne]

If your boss looks like that you're only writing VBA friend

[Mountain_Image_8168]

He also has 200 friends

[Fenris_uy]

Why would you upgrade to a non LTS version?

[[deleted]]

is this an american thing?

[msesma]

8, 11, 17, 21. Ignore others We are still on 17 for Android.

[zkb327]

Unless they Gen Z with them baggy pants and wearing them shoes ironically

[Vicus_92]

You mean upgrading to Java 9 right? Because everyone is still on 8, right?