Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better

The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time.

I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

I hear that now, decades into Java, they have figured out how to launch a program without slowing a computer down for 10+ seconds, but I'll be damned if I find out. There are still so many rough edges that they never even bothered to try to fix about launching a .jar with classpath dependencies. What a mess!

I understand the sarcasm but this take is devoid of fact. Modern Java loads fast, Java 21 has pretty good functional programming featurez. The ecosystem churns out language level features at a pace and a budget that would put most large funded startups to shame.

Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP. They didn't figure out startup times for 10+ years, they were busy dealing with Oracle and its messy management. I think it will simply continue to get better given that Java has endured through so many language fads. It has its ways to go but it will end up like SQL - here before we were alive and will be here when most of us are dead.

Mostly agreed that Java, warts and all, has gotten better, and will stick around. It's the new COBOL, for better or worse. (I still wouldn't want to use it voluntarily, but if someone pays me enough money, sure.)

However:

> Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP.

The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Financial transactions dwarf GDP by so much that even a bit player of a technology will facilitate more transactions than global GDP.

(And that's fine. Many of these transactions are offsetting, and that it's a sign of an efficient market that the mispricings are so small that participants needs giant gross flows to profit from them.

Somewhat related: a single high capacity fire hose (at about 75kg of water per second) moves about the same number of electrons as you'd need to power the total US electricity consumption at 120V. Obviously, your fire hose also sprays plenty of pesky protons which completely offset the electrical current from the electrons.)

> The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly.

Agreed. I guess its comparing production capacity to distribution capacity. Distribution capacity will equal n_tx * tx_amt. Having said that, another metric to look at is how much of software infrastructure is built on Java. Simply adding AWS to this equation proves the value added by Java backed systems. Hard to say that about any other langauge. Also we can look at versatility, Java is used to write very large data processing systems, CDN networks, API servers and even widely used consumer apps (IntelliJ products). Its very hard to find any other language that has had an outsized impact across domains. Of course the counter being Linux written on C powers all of the internet. True but C doesnt have the cross domain impact that Java has had.

So I disagree with the assessment that Java is a terrible langauge performance or productivity wise or it wouldnt have had this impact.