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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
185 points chhum | 5 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.627s | source
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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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sapiogram ◴[16 May 25 21:22 UTC] No.44009912[source]▶
My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.
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1. arccy ◴[16 May 25 22:22 UTC] No.44010285[source]▶
funny. java is known for its stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together to see the whole thing and it still doesn't tell you anything useful about why the app crashed.
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2. marginalia_nu ◴[16 May 25 22:42 UTC] No.44010426[source]▶
I think that's a bit unfair. Generally the stacktraces tell you exactly what and where the problem is. Generally shouldn't be more than a dozen lines or so.

The main area they get excessively lengthy is in certain frameworks and testing tools that can add like 100 lines to the trace.

3. hu3 ◴[16 May 25 23:18 UTC] No.44010656[source]▶
as someone who had to deal with Java stack traces the entire week, I feel attacked.

God bless Gemini 2.5 Pro which ate all the traces for breakfast.

4. frontfor ◴[16 May 25 23:45 UTC] No.44010801[source]▶
Compared to Go where I always have to remember to print the stack trace in every goroutine’s panic handler or use a custom error type that includes the stack trace or I get nothing? And I have to do this very basic thing for every service I spin up? This might not matter for pet projects or CLI applications, but it matters a lot in large scale mission critical servers.
5. jjav ◴[17 May 25 00:52 UTC] No.44011174[source]▶
> stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together

If you wrote code with such deep stacktraces, it's all on you.

There's a performance cost to all that excessive stack depth too, often.