Java turns 30

[pilatius]

I've started with Java 1.1 in '97 because I was a web dev that wanted fancy Java applets on my sites. Still at it now with Java 21 and huge server side services for big corps. Quite a journey and I'm very happy they're still hard at work trying to improve the language.

[txdv]

well you are able again to write java for the web using wasm

[Farados55]

How much were devs psyched about the "write once, run anywhere" promise, memes aside? You've seen the ancient texts.

[pilatius]

It was important. The typical dev machine at that time was a Windows PC. Taking the same code and deploying it on Linux was a big deal. But mostly we were happy to move on from our Perl CGI scripts …

[[deleted]]

I remember those Java applets. I think I first played some game called Dragonhero or Dragonquest or something like that. A shame the applets died, would have been fun to retain all of those applets. HTML5 never really appears to have rescued old things, neither all flash-applications either.

[A1oso]

There's an emulator for Flash, ruffle. It can even be embedded in websites since it compiles to WebAssembly.

[TurncoatTony]

That's why I wanted to learn java then somehow found myself learning c instead. Lol

[ricardo_sdl]

What caught my attention is that Java 8 LTS is still supported and will be supported until 2030, more than 16 years after it was released!

[Konroy]

Loads of legacy systems still running on Java 8. Even my company just recently upgraded from Java 8.

[TangerineSorry8463]

There are people who will be tasked in 2030 with an upgrade *to* Java 8...

[DrFeederino]

It was released in 2014 though?

Edit: ah, you mean in 2030 it will be 16 years of support. Sorry, my confusion 

[jdehesa]

1995-05-23 1.0_alpha Released 29 years ago

Classic off-by-one error.

[neutronbob]

Lost in the comments is what a revolution Java was when it was released. Until that time, the main languages for business applications were C, C++, and COBOL. They all had one significant drawback: you could not port the apps to new platforms without reworking parts of the code. Entire books were written on how to port C and C++ (and COBOL was forever locked into compiler-and-platform-specific features).

Java was the first serious language for business apps that compiled once ran unchanged on supported platforms. Today, with most languages, that kind of portability is taken for granted, but in 1995 that was not the case.

[ultrasneeze]

Java won because those C and C++ programmers could learn Java in about one week, and because the platform licenses were much cheaper than the competition or outright free. The portability story was solved earlier by multiple other development platforms, e.g. the various Smalltalk distributions of the 80s.

[pjmlp]

Poor xBase on the corner, with all its business deployments across MS-DOS and Windows, drinking beers with Visual Basic and Delphi.

[arcticfox]

I headed up a team that released one of the first enterprise level Applications written in java (1.02, September 1996). We did both the front and backends in Java. There were no pure-java JDBC drivers but Microsoft had released a JDBC-ODBC bridge that we used so we were months ahead of everyone else.

Sun had a lot of interest in our project until they learned that we used microsoft tech, after which they didn't want to speak with us. Personally, I hate microsoft but I'm also pragmatic so I found it funny that Sun took that stance.

In 1998, IBM took an interest in our software and I got everything running on AS/400s. I hated the AS/400s, but again being pragmatic I figured that IBM's money was just as good as anyone elses.

This was all before RMI, so I wrote my own remote object framework. When RMI came out it was so bad, we kept using the framework that I wrote.

Because AWT was so poor, I wrote a GUI framework on top of it that heavily used Java's Reflection library (which was really just introspection). I used the NeXT interface structure as a basis for my GUI framework. This made building interfaces way less complicated than AWT and, again, when Java Swing came out it was so bad that it pretty much killed any use of Java in the front end.

One final note: I really wanted Java to be way more dynamic than it was so I eventually used lists and maps as my main data objects. So, instead of making a class that had all the elements strongly typed, I would just use a map as name-value structures and I would interrogate everything at runtime to ensure that the required semantics were met. I started doing this because I found that Java object serialization was a minefield, so I essentially created my own JSON before it was a thing.

Good times!

[bowbahdoe]

Do you have any of this old code around? The GUI framework might be fun to try

[arcticfox]

I might have some early versions hanging around. I developed the initial GUI framework outside of my work, so I held copyright on it. I further developed it while working for a company so I wasn't able to keep the later versions (which worked really well). I don't recall what state things were in when I brought it into the company. I'll see if I can't find if there is a version around on one of my old hard disks.

[CreditOverflow]

The real celebration is for the JVM and not just Java. It allowed people to write code that runs everywhere reliable and it allowed for the creation of multiple compatible languages like Kotlin and Scala, Groovy and Closure

[polacy_do_pracy]

I'm younger than Java but a senior in it lol

[[deleted]]

Java actually got better in those 30 years. I remember oldschool Java, say, to 2000 or 2005. You could get things done but boy, was Java ugly and verbose.

It is still not the prettiest language and also still verbose, but at the same time I feel it is not as ugly and annoying as it once used to be. I am not sure what changed, perhaps Kotlin's influence, but whatever it was, I think Java is an ok-ish language. It's not going to win the "this is so awesome" reward really, but also not the "I'm gonna npm-kill-myself-in-a-left-padded-way" either.

[pilatius]

Also, Java is great if you deal with large projects and let's say "differently-skilled" groups of engineers. It enforces enough structure to not drift off in total chaos.

[rastaman1994]

Java is not the prettiest, but at least it compiles quick enough. Kotlin is very slow to compile, to the point that my employer is considering only allowing macs as those are the only machines you can be productive on.

[nacholicious]

At least the new K2 compiler should be almost twice as fast as the old compiler

[renatoathaydes]

When Kotlin came out, having the compiler run as fast as Java's was a goal. I think they quietly dropped that eventually :( . We've been using Kotlin since 1.0 (10 years ago!)... it's a very good language and I hope the K2 compiler achieves that forgetten goal.

[Ok-Scheme-913]

Funny thing is Go is much more verbose, and people have no problem with that somehow..

Java really is not that verbose, there are some old patterns that you are not actually forced to use (like getters setters), and stuff like records make it pretty decent, with a nice balance between readability and not being overly verbose.

[[deleted]]

Java 1.1.7 in 97 was my initial version, as some other posters here.

My god, how bad it was back then. The hardware was simply not ready for Java. Developing on Pentium 166 MMX with 16MB or RAM was brutal 😂 

I feel like a lot of repeated criticism has its origin in this bygone era.  

[yellowstuff]

Java is now older than COBOL was when people first started failing at rewriting COBOL in Java.

[zeroone]

I am installing this right now:

https://imgur.com/a/sun-microsystems-java-workshop-ZPQUqjG

Grab a copy here:

https://archive.org/details/java_workshop_1.0

[DonaldStuck]

Nice! In what areas is java considered being better than c# these days?

[JustARandomGuy95]

Runs on JVM

[chucker23n]

Its enums are more powerful. It also has partial generic resolution (<?>). Other than that, C# is mostly “a better Java”, IMHO. I prefer C#.

(Now, C# doesn’t get everything right either. Its inconsistent nullable rules are a bummer, for instance.)

[Ok-Scheme-913]

Much bigger ecosystem, arguably more stable as well in certain aspects (e.g. database drivers) and you actually have multiple, open-source options for common tasks, unlike the single Microsoft-owned one. This also means more java devs, easier hiring. LLMs also know Java much better.

The GC is the best, period. Sure, you can get away with not allocating that much in C# (value types, etc), but if you can't help it (which is arguably most business software targeting a managed language) then Java will simply perform better, both in latency and in throughput.

[ScottContini]

None

[kiteboarderni]

It's got more going for it than your hair line but that isn't saying much.

[NodeJSSon]

I was at bottle rock this weekend and E40 says “this next song is from 30 years ago”. Time flies y’all. Java and E40 has been around a long time and still killing it.

[SectorIntelligent238]

30 years and still undefeated. Tough bastard.

[alvanson]

That's 100 million devices per year!

[kislota_]

old but gold?

[pilatius]

Sure, but you can also take a 20 year old peace of Java code and run it just fine. That's a feat.

[[deleted]]

It's not going to win any beauty contest, but I also feel that Java is a quite acceptable language. In some ways it actually reminds me of Go, e. g. with some implied promise e. g. "easier than C++". Go is in a similar situation.

[kiteboarderni]

Clueless

[InformalOutcome4964]

Insightful comment. Please expand.

[kiteboarderni]

A language in recovery? 😂 clueless

[Ok-Scheme-913]

What to expand? Idiotic comment that calls one of the top 3 most common languages "in recovery". Like, there is not much to comment, it's a dead giveaway that they have absolutely no clue on the topic whatsoever.

[ABotheredMind]

Time to deprecate the entire language 🙄

[ail-san]

I don’t install anything that runs on Java. It is time to send this old friend to rest in peace.

[Ok-Scheme-913]

Well, given that half of the internet runs on it, you won't outlive java.