Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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.

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier.

Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so poor until it started improving around 2006-2007.

Now I keep an eye on it for other languages that run on the JVM: JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, etc.

IMO JRuby is the most interesting since you gain access to 2 very mature ecosystems by using it. When Java introduced Project Loom and made it possible to use Ruby's Fibers on the JVM via Virtual Threads it was a win for both.

Charles Nutter really doesn't get anywhere close to enough credit for his work there.

Oh yeah. I still don’t understand why we even moved away from the original JEE model, including the different roles (app dev, deployed, etc).

The whole spec was great with the exception of entitybeans.

It provided things that are still not available it anything else.. why do we store configuration/credentials in git (encrypted, but still).

And the context were easy to configure/enter.

Caucho’s resin, highly underrated app server. Maybe not underrated, but at least not very well known

Entity Beans were terrible, representing the height of JEE over complexity. I remember editing at least 3 classes, a couple interfaces, and some horrific XML deployment descriptors to represent an "entity." A lot of the tooling was proprietary to the specific app server. On top of that, it was slow.

In the early 2000's, I used to work on JEE stuff for my day job, then go home and build PHP-based web apps. PHP was at least 10x more productive.