How Java Changed Programming Forever

snydeq writes: With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders. Infoworld reports: "Java's core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done. It popularized good ideas from earlier languages by repackaging them in a format that was familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. Indeed it was precisely this willingness to not only add but also remove features that made Java so much simpler and easier to learn than other object-oriented C descendants."

Comments

Re:Plant?

[peppepz]

The JDK had already been released under the GPL by Sun before the Oracle acquisition.

Re:Plant?

[DickBreath]

VirtualBox keeps getting updated regularly. A new VirtualBox 5 is in beta even as version 4 upgrades come out regularly.

Re:Easier to learn != easier to use

[peppepz]

The basic idea is that in Java programs, you can understand what's going on by looking at a fragment of code. Therefore the code is easy to read and to maintain. With syntactic sugar such as properties, operator overload and closures, you can't know which statements will cause side effects without inspecting upstream definitions.

Type erasure, on the other hand, is pure evil - to me, it's the representation of what happens when a pragmatic language ends up into the hands of computer scientists.

By the way, in Java all lists have the get() method with no exceptions (this includes Lists, HashMaps, Vectors) and all collections have the iterator() method with no exceptions. The At() method doesn't exist.

Re:Plant?

[gstoddart]

VirtualBox we more or less kinda allowed it to die

Ummm ... what the hell are you talking about? I use it daily, I get updates for it regularly, and it's anything but dead.

VirtualBox is alive and well.