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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
253 points chhum | 1 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.254s | 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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lelanthran ◴[16 May 25 16:43 UTC] No.44007464[source]▶
> Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad.

When Java got popular, around 1999-2001, it was not a close third behind C (or C++).

At that time, on those machines, the gap between programs written in C and programs written in Java was about the same as the gap right now between programs written in Java and programs written in pure Python.

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pjmlp ◴[17 May 25 09:29 UTC] No.44013143[source]▶
And yet many of us embraced Java, it became the chosen language to teach distributed systems in many Portuguese universities around 1998, because of the pain to write portable C or C++ code across UNIX clones.

A mix of K&R C, C89, C++ARM compilers catching up with WG21 work, POSIX flavours, and lovely autoconf scripts.

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lelanthran ◴[17 May 25 10:35 UTC] No.44013338[source]▶
> And yet many of us embraced Java,

That was my point - performance was never one of the primary considerations for enterprises. They had more important considerations.

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1. pjmlp ◴[17 May 25 10:56 UTC] No.44013402[source]▶
Also as much as I complain about the lack of JIT tooling in CPython, many people forget that usually most people don't have any issues in polyglot codebases, it isn't a zero-sum game, and various forms of FFI and language bindings exist.

That is one of the things I have been doing across JVM/ART, CLR, V8 for decades now, moreso if we include Perl and Tcl into the mix, I seldom write full blown 100% C or C++ code, when I reach to them, is to write native libraries or implement language bindings.