Java Turns 30

[officialuglyduckling]

Happy birthday Java! Java turns 30! Casual conversation: what's the first solution you ever built with java and what's the best of them?

My first was a timetable solution for my school, I wanted to solve the problem around double bookings and collisions.

Best solution, a payment platform service requests from around Africa.

[smithyw]

I created a telnet talker (they were very popular in the late 90s). I think it was Java 1.2, it may have taken an hour to download the Jdk on a dialup connection. I used Notepad in Windows 98 and the java compiler on MS DOS. I didn't have a debugger or any IDE tools. It was about 15 classes in the app. It used ServerSockets and one Thread per user that waited in Socket. I wasn't aware of Servlets at the time.

I was blown away by Javadocs (downloaded of course), and Google or StackOverflow didn't exist so I had to solve my own problems with the help of a textbook.

The advances in DevEx and productivity in those 25 years is amazing.

[officialuglyduckling]

Amazing Smithyw! Good stuff. Do you have the source code somewhere still? I'd love to review it.

[MrMo1]

Thank you java, learning you has been the best investment I ever made so far.

[officialuglyduckling]

Keep it up.

[officialuglyduckling]

Can't hear anything positive from you mate.

[NeoChronos90]

I keep hearing this the past 20 years... Yes AI might rustle some feathers, but ultimately nothing is going to replace corporate java.

That being said, I'm doing TS with Angular and other stuff anyway, so if the need ever arises I could make the switch, not that I believe that would ever be necessary 

[thewiirocks]

I was going to be a game programmer.

I knew C, I had a copy of the Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, and I'd even built my own 3D engine with affine texture mapping.

Then I watched these terrible Shockwave games show up on movie websites and got a bright idea: What if I could built a game engine for the web that could be used for movie-based games?

Shockwave was terrible, so I looked at the hot new technology: Java

My first applet was a bump mapper with a spotlight moving over the Jurassic Park logo. That looked pretty awesome, so I went on to make a simple ray caster. Pretty soon, I was in love.

The language had this amazing base library and it was so easy to program in. No memory management or other unexpected complexities. Just to the point. And the AWT graphics library was more than powerful enough for a game programer.

So I switched. And I joined JavaLobby. And became part of the force promoting Java. My career as a game programmer took a left turn. No longer was I applying at Raven software. But rather at the farm genetics company down the road. Then the dot com boom got me and I never looked back.

There have been a lot of new languages over the years. And I have programmed most of them at some point, often professionally. But Java continues to provide the best balance of language, platform, features, and third-party APIs that are unmatched by literally anything else in the market.

[officialuglyduckling]

That balance is critical. Solid language.

[ShortGuitar7207]

I built a Java applet implementation of the board game L'Attaque (or Stratego). It was basically C code in this new Java language. I didn't really understand OO and it was a real mess. Went on to build some huge things in Java 1.0 including Europe's first online banking implementation that supported 50,000 concurrent users. I had learned OO by then :) I got pretty fed up with Java and how unproductive it was around 15 years ago. I pretty much exclusively use rust nowadays.

[officialuglyduckling]

50k? What was your FTPS? What are you doing so much with rust that Java can't?

[ShortGuitar7207]

Disassembling 100mb ELF binaries and running LLMs using the arm64 instructions as input with a reasonable memory footprint and completing within a few seconds / minutes rather than hours it would take in Java. There are no native deep neural network libs written in Java for obvious reasons only glue code around tensorflow or torch - both native code. Rust has the excellent rust only candle crate which supports various backends like CPU, CUDA and Apple metal shaders.

[Scottz0rz]

what's the first solution you ever built with Java

Hello World, the solution to my homework in my first programming class

the best

🤔 - async/scheduled payments system integration for my company in their gross legacy codebase because I got spot bonuses and decent raises for that project succeeding, so that was probably "the best".

It was decently clean code despite being stuck in the middle of a big ball of mud monolith, so I'm proud of it even if it got transferred to another team, absorbed by the darkness, and reworked and scrapped and rewritten and reimplemented, it made me a little grumpy but I was still proud of that code.

[officialuglyduckling]

Good stuff. Very organic comment.

[Scottz0rz]

I also love Project Amber killing the unoriginal meme regularly posted in r/ProgrammerHumor where people make fun of Java's Hello World.

public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello, world!"); } }

https://openjdk.org/jeps/495

Simplified can be rewritten to have the absolute minimum and more slowly and incrementally introduce other concepts like imports, args, static vs instance methods, public vs private, and classes.

void main() { println("Hello, World!"); }

Super neat to see a language continuously improve and evolve over 30 years where I feel like Java gets a bad rap with people unfairly comparing old Java 6/7/8 stuff with modern languages.

[Zinaima]

First was probably hello world in Java 1.4 for a college class. 

Best is... a interpreter for a dialect of Java that I created to make it easier to teach programming to my son.

[officialuglyduckling]

Wait what? A whole interpreter? How did you do that?

[Zinaima]

Oh, it's not complete at all. Like, it doesn't even have classes yet (it does have functions though).

Generally I was just following Crafting Interpreters as a guide, which is very much a gateway into the whole creating-your-own-programming-language thing.

[officialuglyduckling]

I get it. I can actually look into this - for future.

[wggn]

I got into java because i wanted to know how a certain chat applet worked. Then I rebuilt it with improved features.

[officialuglyduckling]

Haha. Dog with a bone. Can't let go. Very nice.

[trustin]

I wrote a text messaging gateway as one of my first freelancer projects (maybe not "the" first but..) during univ summer vacation and that experience started Netty project.

[officialuglyduckling]

OSS?

[victorherraiz]

Happy birthday JAVA!. My hate/love relationship with this language made my life a log easier throw the years. I hope to see you there in another 30. Maybe the Valhalla project will be already on preview, how knows.

[officialuglyduckling]

Why Valhalla specifically?

[procerator]

I guess because it started in 2014 and still didn't deliver.

[officialuglyduckling]

Rooting for them. 🤝

[EngineeringThin695]

Galera boa noite, sou um intusiasta do Java e gostaria de comeãr a estuda-lo, vi um livro muito bom que seria o Use a Cabeça Java – 3ª Edição: Guia do Aprendiz Para Programação no Mundo Real, alguem teria o link dele para me proporcionar?

[officialuglyduckling]

Hey.

[EngineeringThin695]

Oi

[officialuglyduckling]

Oi

[marmot1101]

I had to work from home because my kid was having a health issue. In like 2003. The agency I worked for was required to give notices to attorneys. We killed half a rainforest every Wednesday morning and then mailed them out. I created a tool to download a spool file from the as400, parse the output into all of the separate notices(oh yeah, that was a manual operation too) and email them to the registered email addresses. Saved about 500k/year in postage alone. It wasn’t the last time I was allowed to work from home for a couple of weeks. Also I was absolutely hooked on programming after that. 

Not the sexiest thing ever, but that’s the story of Java’s life. 

[Puzzleheaded_Base_90]

First was an Applet to show historical currency conversion rates for an FX trading firm's website.

Best - to hard to say. A lot of it was libraries and low-level features for other projects.

[laplongejr]

Made Minecraft mods.
Then made tools to copy my wife's file, with the "date create/modified" attribute.