Don't worry, all that's not getting widely used anyway. Cool startups don't touch Java anyway, and places like banks are still firmly at Java 8. My current employer is somewhat progressive, whole system is just a couple of years old, design is very much modern, microservices, event sourcing, reactive, cool reactive frontend on websockets, etc etc.
Still Java 8 for the most part. Java 11 is actually allowed, but not many people care including me. Existing Scala code is getting thrown away and rewritten back into Java.
JDK is different story tho. I think devops are actively experimenting to put 11 into base image by default, but startup time different is funny argument. 1 second, really? By the time your usual spring boot service comes up and connects to all topics and caches and what not it's good part of a minute anyway.
> For those who learn java in school and don't much touch it again, it can be quite confusing.
Is it really _confusing_? The idea that a product might change release cadence probably should not be confusing.
Well, the fact that all of the sudden there are all these new versions is surprising. That makes the title of the article confusing, because one doesnt expect that v8 is considered super obsolete.
It seems java was relatively stable from 2006 to 2016, where there where three versions. But instead of slowing down, there have been 8 since then. They`re on v16 now?!
...I doubt I`ll ever code in java again.