←back to thread

Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
253 points chhum | 7 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.675s | source | bottom
Show context
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.

replies(6): >>44009912 #>>44009928 #>>44009952 #>>44010109 #>>44010282 #>>44010468 #
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.

replies(12): >>44010302 #>>44010329 #>>44010450 #>>44010481 #>>44010493 #>>44010636 #>>44010692 #>>44010825 #>>44010902 #>>44011079 #>>44011124 #>>44012556 #
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.
replies(2): >>44010574 #>>44010608 #
1. 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.

replies(4): >>44010740 #>>44010762 #>>44011086 #>>44011178 #
2. frontfor ◴[16 May 25 23:34 UTC] No.44010740[source]▶
That might be true for other Oracle products like the DB, but has that been true for Java and openjdk?
replies(1): >>44013068 #
3. wslh ◴[16 May 25 23:39 UTC] No.44010762[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.
4. antod ◴[17 May 25 00:36 UTC] No.44011086[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.
replies(1): >>44011133 #
5. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:45 UTC] No.44011133[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.

6. cyberax ◴[17 May 25 00:53 UTC] No.44011178[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.

7. homebrewer ◴[17 May 25 09:12 UTC] No.44013068[source]▶
Sure. Here's just one example I was able to quickly find in the browser history:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/users_advised_to_revi...

You can easily just not use the Oracle JDK, though, unless you're running commercial software which requires running on the Oracle runtime to get technical support.

As others have said, the problem is not the runtime, but libraries: many major .NET libraries have been going fully commercial, you can't really trust the ecosystem anymore.