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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
177 points chhum | 2 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.019s | 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. javier2 ◴[16 May 25 17:02 UTC] No.44007662[source]▶
> Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable

This is something I greatly value with the recent changes to Java. They found a great way to include sealed classes, switch expression, project Loom, records that feels at home in the existing Java syntax.

The tooling with heap dump analyzers, thread dump analyzers, GC analyzers is also top notch.

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2. aardvark179 ◴[16 May 25 20:16 UTC] No.44009433[source]▶
I think Gavin Bierman is an unsung hero as far as steering the Java language is concerned. I had the privilege to sit next to him in the office when I was working on TruffleRuby, and our conversations on language design were always elucidating, and his ability to gently steer others away from pitfalls was something I wish I could do as well.

Hearing the work he and others did to gradually introduce pattern matching without painting themselves into a corner was fascinating and inspiring.