True, but if you are running something like WebSphere or Weblogic then upgrading your JVM invalidates product support. So, now you have to upgrade product versions, which often requires changes to deployment scripts, breaking changes in those products, new software licenses, etc.
Having said that being on and old supported version of these products means you are at least enjoying Java 6.
... and we use WebSphere 7 because we like to read hackernews while publishing our code ...
You lucky ones!
My last contact with Websphere was in 2014 and the customer was still using 6.1 on their production servers.
Yes, the problem is when you as a developer have zero value for the company IT and have to make the application run on the servers that IT configured for the whole enterprise, not just our snowflake application.
Re:JDK 9 release schedule
by LurkerAbove on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @02:58PM
(#12737564)
Earlier this year I was working with an outfit that was on Java 4 for A Really Important Business Application. That said, they were looking at moving to IIRC 7 just as I was leaving.
Are you serious? Even the worst shops I've been at have at least moved their JVMs to Java7 back around 2014. I mean you can take all your existing JARs from Java4 and run them on Java8 and nothing should break. Recompiling them might be another issue, but still not a huge one.