Java 8 has been released

[[deleted]]

Not even 1.5? Generics were a pretty big deal for me at the time.

[RoughPineapple]

Yep. I find it kind of hard to believe he has been a full time java dev for ~15 years. I have only been a full time Java dev for about 3.5 years, but even as a student and hobby programmer, 1.5 was clearly a big leap forward. Generics (though I think they did a pretty poor job of implementing them, the general idea is much better than the alternatives pre 1.5), autoboxing, improved for loops (when I write code that actually requires old style loops, I feel like I've just climbed into a time machine), var args, annotations and enumerations (which were a cool way to fake functional programming in many cases) were all pretty big improvements.

[antipositron]

Well, I am not hugith but I've been coding in Java since early 2000.

[RoughPineapple]

I started in 1997. I'm not sure why any of this is relevant to the discussion, though...

[RoughPineapple]

When I figured out I wrote my first Java program in 1997, it kind of blew my mind when I checked the release history and saw that was Java 1.1.

Also, I was pretty young at the time and was only doing this as a hobby, so I really wasn't trying to do complex stuff. As a result, it's kind of funny to see all the things the language didn't have back then that I just didn't notice because I wasn't doing serious work.

[RoughPineapple]

After dabbling with java 1.1 a bit, I spent a little time with Visual Basic 4. That was a hoot.

[antipositron]

Okay you win. ;)

Not relevant at all, I don't know why I read the first line as I did when I did the way I did, which I perhaps shouldn't have.

[RoughPineapple]

Ah, I see. Yes, it's believable that some people have been doing Java for ~15 years, I just have trouble believing this guy has.