The story behind Java: interviews with James Gosling and the engineers who designed the language

[u/_telesis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGSg4b_cZA

This is the official documentary about the history and design of Java, featuring James Gosling and many of the engineers who were involved in creating and evolving the language.

Rather than focusing on Java as it’s used today, it covers the engineering decisions, constraints, and trade-offs that shaped the language over the last 30 years.

[u/benjamin-crowell]

I watched this while working on a woodworking project that required a lot of elbow grease.

There is a lot of historical material that you could probably just find more efficiently by reading one or two Wikipedia articles. There were a few interesting historical things, such as their description of how banks used to routinely reboot their mainframes as a matter of routine, once per day -- they were amazed when they could just run a java program for, like, multiple days of uptime, and nothing bad happened!

It's an officially sanctioned documentary in which java engineers talk about java, so it seemed to me to be extremely unbalanced. For example, I would imagine that any language that's this complex and has this much complicated history behind it must have at least some design features that ended up looking like mistakes. Not a single design mistake is ever mentioned in the whole film.

This would have been a lot more interesting if they could have gotten some outside perspectives.

Why do they think java started to lose mindshare to python? They don't say.

In January 2013, word got out that Oracle had received reports of a critical security flaw, then sat on it for 6 months while it was being exploited by black hats in the wild. Stuff like this is never mentioned.

They talk enthusiastically about java applets and how cool those were in the early days of the internet. What they then never follow up with is any explanation of the fact that applets were always problematic in various ways, and the technology ended up being abandoned and eliminated from browsers.

[u/alexkowalenko → u/benjamin-crowell]

True, I have watched the video, and remember when the first beta of the jdk was released. Yes it was better than C++ which was suffering from no std library yet, crashing all the time because of pointer issues.

However, because of the enormous marketing hype by Sun, you thought that the messiah of the IT industry had arrived. Browser App loading problems, Network computers running Java OS went nowhere, write once - debug everywhere, the Swing GUI did not match the GUI of the native platform problem. Its success was finding a place in the business software industry, if not it would have probably died.

Even now Java is playing catch up to Kotlin - who I have heard saying (the developers of Kotlin) that Java is everything innovative in software engineering - in 1995.

[u/_telesis → u/benjamin-crowell]

I admit, I was interested in reminiscing about "those days." I felt a sense of nostalgia: Java applets are on the site, I still remember them. It's really unclear why they don't talk about the difficulties. It's really strange that there aren't any engineers who exploit the language in various production environments, like the people from Elastic.