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

Plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does it feel like Oracle is advertising Java with these stories...

Re:Plant?

[jellomizer]

Well Oracle killing off Java was one of the biggest fear after it acquired Sun Microsystems. MySql was open sourced so it could fork like it had. VirtualBox we more or less kinda allowed it to die. Star err Open err LibreOffice had forked so many times that people probably forgot the Sun Acquired it as StarWriter. The Sun Servers Sparc based were declining in popularity.

But Java was the important thing we couldn't let die. And it isn't open source so the community couldn't steal it away from oracle.

Re:Plant?

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Java can be as fast or even faster than C++.

Java is great on microbenchmarks, and it's a great demonstration that languages could provide high performance and still be safe at the same time. Unfortunately, writing larger systems that perform well in Java is quite hard: you can write fast inner loops, but if you try to use abstractions anywhere, usually things get really slow. Java's garbage collector is also quite good, but unfortunately, the standard libraries force interfaces on you that result in the generation of vast amounts of garbage, so that effect is negated as well.

Although superficially pretty similar, .NET actually fixes many of those problems. And with LLVM, more languages like that are appearing.

It allows for more mediocre programmers

[pauljlucas]

According to Joel, Java isn't hard enough to weed out mediocre programmers in college. (Great programmers can use any language well.)

Java is just a tool like any other language

[msobkow]

No language is inherently good or evil in and of itself (save for PHP, which is evil incarnate.)

It is simply a tool for expressing logic. A means of structuring data.

Some are elegant for certain classes of problems, some are abused to fit problem sets they aren't suited for.

The sole benefit of Java to me is it's portability for core logic, even though I know that once you're dealing with user interfaces and heavy duty multi-threading, there are "write once, test everywhere" problems with the language.

Java isn't even predictable on my Linux box. It randomly crashes for no apparent reason while running code that has run cleanly thousands upon thousands of times in the past. Yet after years and years of successful runs of my pet project (http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net/), I had Java 7 on Ubuntu crash a couple weeks ago during a run. The compiler itself crashes on a regular basis; several times per week.

As to why all the Java articles lately? Oracle's "Java World" conference is coming up, so it's time to beat the drums, sacrifice the sheep, and burn the entrails on the altar of the language. The high priests are out in droves preaching the gospel.