Re:Java is still available at zero-cost
by tannhaeuser on Friday August 31, 2018 @01:37AM
(#17883203)
More breakages are expected going forward, though. That's the whole idea of releasing early and oftenly (and having customers to pay for backward-compat). Note I'm not saying Oracle has no right to monetize Java, though it could be said what makes Java valuable is the (mostly OSS) ecosystem around it, rather than Java the language itself or the JVM.
> As a Java developer, ...
I've been developing Java for a living since almost the beginning (since 1997), but I'd seriously recommend not tying yourself to a particular language as in "Java developer". Java is but a tool among others, and I generally can work better with devs that know more than just Java, for the pragmatism and utilitarism they bring, rather than Java devs dogmatizing and bragging about the latest fad in Java idioms and libs.
Actually I don't think there will be more breaking changes than there were in the past due to the new release cadence. Mark Reinhold gave a great talk about the values they try to follow when moving the platform forward: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HpbchS5kmio
This applies to the new release cadence as well. But time will tell if they will achieve their goals.
But even if you weren’t using the new features, there was basically no downside to upgrading the run time. The newer version is usually ran much better thanks to improvements in threading or garbage collection. And you knew you’d get security patches, even if you ended up getting stuck on that version for a while.
As you said, libraries and frameworks can be a big issue to upgrade.
But the backwards compatibility promises of Java have been so incredibly strong it hasn’t been an issue.
The one time breakage in Java 9 is basically the first I’ve experienced in my career.