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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
177 points chhum | 1 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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exabrial ◴[16 May 25 14:51 UTC] No.44006194[source]▶
Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

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1. lelanthran ◴[16 May 25 16:43 UTC] No.44007464[source]▶
> Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad.

When Java got popular, around 1999-2001, it was not a close third behind C (or C++).

At that time, on those machines, the gap between programs written in C and programs written in Java was about the same as the gap right now between programs written in Java and programs written in pure Python.