Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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.

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.

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.

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.

In fact, Java 1.5 got generics in 2004, one year before C# 2.0 added them in 2005. OTOH C# 2.0 had anonymous delegates, although syntactically they were still very verbose (no type inference for arguments) and thus only marginally better than Java's anonymous classes.

It was really from 2007 on (.NET 3.5 / C# 3.0) that C# started to get major features at an ever increasing pace while Java significantly stagnated for quite a long time.