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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
176 points chhum | 1 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.246s | source
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cloudking ◴[16 May 25 14:43 UTC] No.44006117[source]▶
Why is Java so popular in enterprise?
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hackthemack ◴[16 May 25 14:51 UTC] No.44006195[source]▶
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.
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1. aaronbaugher ◴[16 May 25 15:22 UTC] No.44006571[source]▶
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.