Re:IT Runs on Java 8
by jjoonathan on Friday May 10, 2019 @02:01PM
(#19880467)
"Legacy" includes good things too, not just bad things.
I grew up promising myself that I'd never touch Java, but when I did, it was a relevation. Everything just works. The debugger was just "attach and go" -- no recompilation with different flags, no fishing for the IDE / plugin version in which it wasn't broken, no glaring missing features (conditional breakpoints, stack traces...) The frameworks were refreshingly complete; I always felt that extensibility mechanisms were available so that I didn't have to gamble that my requirements fell into the "just works" subset rather than the "just doesn't" subset. I never had to wonder if integrating with some bog-standard protocol would mean maintaining my own open source project; maven always had something workable available.
Java wasn't born like this, but the legacy it accumulated made it formidable.
Early-adopting a hip language nets you a few sexy wins at the cost of completely eliminating a gigantic Brontosaurus-size long tail of important functionality and ecosystem maturity.
I grew up promising myself that I'd never touch Java, but when I did, it was a relevation. Everything just works. The debugger was just "attach and go" -- no recompilation with different flags, no fishing for the IDE / plugin version in which it wasn't broken, no glaring missing features (conditional breakpoints, stack traces...) The frameworks were refreshingly complete; I always felt that extensibility mechanisms were available so that I didn't have to gamble that my requirements fell into the "just works" subset rather than the "just doesn't" subset. I never had to wonder if integrating with some bog-standard protocol would mean maintaining my own open source project; maven always had something workable available.
Java wasn't born like this, but the legacy it accumulated made it formidable.
Early-adopting a hip language nets you a few sexy wins at the cost of completely eliminating a gigantic Brontosaurus-size long tail of important functionality and ecosystem maturity.