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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
183 points chhum | 36 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 1.491s | source | bottom
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nelup20 ◴[16 May 25 21:01 UTC] No.44009800[source]▶
I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).

It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.

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1. kllrnohj ◴[16 May 25 22:21 UTC] No.44010282[source]▶
Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it)

But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

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2. echelon ◴[16 May 25 22:25 UTC] No.44010302[source]▶
That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble.

Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open.

Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it.

The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.

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3. jayd16 ◴[16 May 25 22:28 UTC] No.44010329[source]▶
Its actually quietly very popular in very boring contexts outside of Silicon Valley. Its also slowly entering new areas now that Linux builds are rock solid.

MS does have an uphill PR battle though.

4. ◴[16 May 25 22:31 UTC] No.44010348[source]▶
5. bsaul ◴[16 May 25 22:44 UTC] No.44010450[source]▶
Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.
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6. watwut ◴[16 May 25 22:47 UTC] No.44010481[source]▶
Definitely not. All the stuff I was used to get for free and advice I that was one google search away ... just dont exist in dotnet. Or is expensive. But most of the time, there is weaker library not doing nearly enough and that is all that exists.
7. dagw ◴[16 May 25 22:49 UTC] No.44010493[source]▶
nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity

C# is extremely popular in all kinds of 'boring' industries. Having worked in areas like logistics and civil engineering, C# is everywhere.

8. cgh ◴[16 May 25 23:03 UTC] No.44010574[source]▶
Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.
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9. hu3 ◴[16 May 25 23:08 UTC] No.44010608[source]▶
I don't see Java being any better in this regard.

Microsoft has been historically much less aggressive with lawyers compared to Oracle.

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10. nextos ◴[16 May 25 23:13 UTC] No.44010636[source]▶
C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky.

Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.

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11. breadwinner ◴[16 May 25 23:25 UTC] No.44010692[source]▶
One area where C# really messed up is exception handling.

See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

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12. frontfor ◴[16 May 25 23:34 UTC] No.44010740{3}[source]▶
That might be true for other Oracle products like the DB, but has that been true for Java and openjdk?
13. hocuspocus ◴[16 May 25 23:37 UTC] No.44010753[source]▶
Java could have easily caught up with C# in the early 2000s. In 2001 Pizza (Scala's ancestor) showcased generics, higher-order functions, ADTs and pattern matching. Interestingly enough only generics made it to Java in a reasonable timeframe, the rest came only much later.

Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and break backwards compatibility with major versions of C# and the .NET runtime, Java was deliberately moving at a much slower pace.

14. wslh ◴[16 May 25 23:39 UTC] No.44010762{3}[source]▶
I think OP means that .NET has strong connections with Microsoft technologies where it is a natural decision to use Azure instead of AWS.
15. wokkel ◴[16 May 25 23:50 UTC] No.44010825[source]▶
It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.
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16. astura ◴[17 May 25 00:05 UTC] No.44010902[source]▶
C# isn't popular in startups for the same reason Java isn't, it's "boring."

It's an extremely common language in "boring" companies doing "boring" (but profitable) work.

17. easton ◴[17 May 25 00:19 UTC] No.44010987[source]▶
They intentionally chose to not have checked exceptions though, and people have different opinions on it. They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway instead of selecting on a very specific type (which is often how it works, in web apps anyway.)

https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...

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18. runjake ◴[17 May 25 00:29 UTC] No.44011041{3}[source]▶
IOW Linux on the server?
19. runjake ◴[17 May 25 00:30 UTC] No.44011050[source]▶
AFIACT, either most or at least a significant percentage of dotnet code runs on Linux, depending on the industry.
20. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:34 UTC] No.44011072[source]▶
IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.
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21. astrange ◴[17 May 25 00:35 UTC] No.44011079[source]▶
> But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it.

I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.

22. antod ◴[17 May 25 00:36 UTC] No.44011086{3}[source]▶
The poster was talking about the ecosystem not the core platform. The wider Java ecosystem was heavily dominated by many Apache (and other) open source libraries vs commercial products for the C# ecosystem.
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23. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 00:41 UTC] No.44011111{3}[source]▶
> They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway

Their belief was wrong. Microsoft now recommends against catching Exception.

The article you linked to is addressed at the bottom of this article: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

24. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 00:42 UTC] No.44011113{3}[source]▶
> they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code

That's so ignorant. Read the article please.

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25. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:45 UTC] No.44011133{4}[source]▶
Most of the features that require Apache or community packages in Java ship out of box in .NET (or via extension packages).

They also tend to be of higher quality and provide better performance.

26. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:49 UTC] No.44011156[source]▶
Quite a few languages "loved" by "Linux communities" tend to have rather rudimentary integration with Linux kernel's facilities or worse packaging story.

For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).

27. cyberax ◴[17 May 25 00:53 UTC] No.44011178{3}[source]▶
Java has a strong history of OpenSource, and a great set of libraries. It also pioneered the managed dependency system early (Maven), so these libraries have been centrally available for two decades.

Moreover, a lot of these libraries are well-supported to this day. For example, Hibernate (the best ORM in business) is 28 years old, and has just released a new version. I recently consulted my former client (from 15 years ago), and I still recognized most parts of the stack that I set up way back then.

28. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:54 UTC] No.44011181{4}[source]▶
Let's revisit past conversations:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326

And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.

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29. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 01:20 UTC] No.44011309{5}[source]▶
> I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions.

I could copy/paste the entire article here... but it would be easier if you could take a gander: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

Summary:

Crashy code: You have no compiler-enforced way to know what exceptions might be thrown from a method or library.

More crashy code: If a method starts throwing a new exception, you might not realize you need to update your error handling.

Dead code: If a method stops throwing an exception, old catch blocks may linger, becoming dead code.

30. jayd16 ◴[17 May 25 01:33 UTC] No.44011368[source]▶
Java streams and a lot of other APIs are extremely ugly because of checked exceptions. Conversely, LINQ and delegates and a lot of other syntax is far cleaner in C#.

Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?

If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.

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31. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 01:41 UTC] No.44011399{3}[source]▶
> Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?

Because you won't get a stack trace.

32. vips7L ◴[17 May 25 01:50 UTC] No.44011441{3}[source]▶
Checked exceptions could still work across lambdas. Scala is doing research there: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ca...
33. fuzztester ◴[17 May 25 02:18 UTC] No.44011550[source]▶
>Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills,

which ones?

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34. echelon ◴[17 May 25 02:51 UTC] No.44011676{3}[source]▶
So many.

Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore, but is open source and Linux friendly. GitHub, VScode, Typescript. Azure is booming, ...

But the big one: stock price.

35. bigstrat2003 ◴[17 May 25 03:07 UTC] No.44011745[source]▶
I don't know that I'd say "messed up", but I do wish C# had checked exceptions. I strongly believe that they are superior to non-checked exceptions, basically static type signatures but for error handling. It's a real pity that everything after Java seems to have abandoned the idea.
36. bigstrat2003 ◴[17 May 25 03:11 UTC] No.44011760{5}[source]▶
> I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.

Reducing boilerplate is not a valuable goal in and of itself. The question is, does the boilerplate buy you something? I think that with checked exceptions it does. Having an explicit type signature for what errors a function can raise improves correctness a great deal because the compiler can enforce the contracts of those functions.

I agree that the Rust approach is good too, though I don't agree it has any strong advantages over the way Java does things. Both approaches are equally respectable in my view.