> you don't have REPL

(ahem) https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/jshell/introductio...

only since 2017 :) people basically judge java based on what you learn in AP CS which is basically (a dumbed down version of) java 6 (released 2006).

It’s honestly the only programming language that will get its 1996 version compared to a new 2025 version of another language. And the only language that will be criticized by someone who last used it in 2006.

PHP gets the same treatment all the time.

PHP and Laravel are amazing.

I have been developing Java for a long time and my brain tends to stay stuck in Java 8 mode a lot of the time.

Definitely not the only language. Other long-lived languages like C++ get this treatment too.

> And the only language that will be criticized by someone who last used it in 2006.

You don't sound like you work with Java. I know for a fact that even some FANGs, with their army of software engineers, still use Java8 for most of their Java projects.

Historically an upgrade could cause issues if the code or dependencies used undocumented functionality (like Byte code manipulation) or calls to native code, or the transitions to modules in v9. Upgrades after version 11 should be less "risky" and be easier to argue to management.

From what I can tell, there are 4 main reasons why some don't upgrade.

1. They have legacy software and are afraid of breaking it, sometimes with good reasons.

2. The devs don't know or care enough about the new versions to bother with it. Noone is promoted because of an upgrade. Work to live, and don't live to work

3. The ones who don't have buy in from management to spend time fixing something that works

4. They are using version 11+ that should be much safer to upgrade than earlier versions, but they are still in the mindset of 1 or 2 above

There have been huge improvements not only in the language itself, but also performance and memory use. They could save money if they upgrade, but in some cases this is acceptable because they can make more money by spending time on a new feature, than an upgrade.

In my last 3 workplaces, they usually tried to use the latest LTS versions. But to be honest, some of the services were in maintenance mode and we didn't get enough benefits to upgrade, so we were sometimes falling behind. Today we have a mix of v17 and v21. Anyone can upgrade anytime they want but noone cares about a service that you seldom work with. I feel kind of bad for that, but not enough to bother. I focus mainly on the services that I work with daily, and make sure they are using the latest versions

> From what I can tell, there are 4 main reasons why some don't upgrade.

You missed the most obvious reason to not upgrade: there is no good reason to do it.

> There have been huge improvements not only in the language itself, but also performance and memory use.

That's debatable, and even if we blindly assume that then it's debatable whether the upgrade justifies the gains.

More often than not, it doesn't.

> That's debatable, and even if we blindly assume that then it's debatable whether the upgrade justifies the gains

This is not debatable. It’s a factual truth. Every single actual performance review concludes that modern Java vastly out performs the decade old Java 8 runtime.

For an example here is a quote from Hazelcast when comparing performance of modern Java on data heavy workloads [0]:

> JDK 8 is an antiquated runtime. The default Parallel collector enters huge Full GC pauses and the G1, although having less frequent Full GCs, is stuck in an old version that uses just one thread to perform it, resulting in even longer pauses. Even on a moderate heap of 12 GB, the pauses were exceeding 20 seconds for Parallel and a full minute for G1. The ConcurrentMarkSweep collector is strictly worse than G1 in all scenarios, and its failure mode are multi-minute Full GC pauses.

This is from 2020 and the gap has only gotten wider.

[0] https://hazelcast.com/blog/performance-of-modern-java-on-dat...

I work in Java every day and have upgraded my entire companies fleet of services to Java 21. FANGs are nothing special. And every actual survey shows that there are as many people on a runtime > 8 as there are people on 8:

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/java/

> And every actual survey shows that there are as many people on a runtime > 8 as there are people on 8:

I don't think you even bothered to read the sources you're quoting, and you're just trying to make baseless assertions.

The very first question on JetBrain's survey is "Which versions of Java do you regularly use?", and 50% answered Java 8 with around 2% mentioning Java 7 and 1% answering Java 6. On top of that, Java11 alone comprised around 38%.

And you're talking about Java21? It doesn't even register in the survey at all.

I'm not talking about Java 21 when referring to that data, I was refuting your baseless claim that I don't work in Java. I don't think you even bothered to actually read or comprehend my comment.

The data there clearly shows that the ecosystem has as many users running a modern version. Which directly counters your assertion that everyone is just running 8.

> people basically judge java based on what you learn in AP CS which is basically (a dumbed down version of) java 6 (released 2006).

I don't think people realize Java8 was until very recently the dominant java version in production software, and currently close to 90% of all java projects still run on java11 and earlier.

Edit: after checking New Relic's 2024 report on the java ecosystem, it sounds like java11 and earlier is now at slightly over 60%, with java17 being used in around 35% of the projects.

For software written in that era currently under maintenance mode, I don't expect people to upgrade their java language version though upgrading their JVM is a good idea.

Try doing a cold load of JShell though. Can easily take 2 seconds on a rather fast machine. People will never use it as a quick REPL for that reason.

I use it as a repl all the time. IntelliJ can load your projects classpath into too. It’s really awesome.

Thanks, I'll give it a shot in IntelliJ.

docs if you're interested: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/jshell-console.html

It's implicitly still a class, you just don't need to write all the scaffolding to indicate that. The functions are still methods of that class etc.

But, yes, with static imports, you can just write "println" like that and have it work.

> It's implicitly still a class, you just don't need to write all the scaffolding to indicate that.

did you know that every function in a python script is actually an attribute of that module (which is basically a class). so my point is: who cares.

geokon's point still stands. This is meaningless syntax sugar that does not change anything fundamental about Java except add one more special rule into the language aka it is one more thing to learn. Rather than being helpful, it just becomes friction when an old developer uses the old method and a new developer uses the new method.

You still need to know what a main class is, so that you can reference it in your build.gradle file.

If you're using a build.gradle file then you probably won't see any benefit to this implicit class, yes.

But it's useful for little one-off scripts, where you just go `$ java foo.java` from the command line.

I'm having such a hard time figuring out whether this is satirical.

(My guess: It is.)

I know, right?

> So you don't need to worry about functions floating around in a global namespace soup.

Because having classes floating around in a global namespace soup is fundamentally different and should give no worries to anyone. Yet this was argument made in earnest back when arguments about Java's strengths and weaknesses were much more popular.

There's always going to be a namespace soup but at least in Java there's only one kind of thing in the soup.

The famous "anemic namespace soup" language design pattern.

Hey, it could be Perl!

With the 1:1 intended correspondence of (public?) class names to source file names I get how that could be considered a feature for ease of use, compared to C++ where any file could define any name.

As others mentioned, there is an implicit class here in play.

Basically, imagine a `class Temporary4738 {` and `}` written above and below the .java file's content, that's roughly how it will behave.

It not having a fixed name is deliberate, so if you decide to build a bigger system you won't use this mechanism in a hard to maintain way, and also it needed a good semantic model for "top-level" variables/fields.

But with this implicit class model, top-level definitions are just fields of the class.

> As others mentioned, there is an implicit class here in play.

The same strategy is also followed by C# with their top-level statements. And yes, it's syntactic sugar.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...

Because this is the entrypoint? Having code exec out of an explicitly defined entry point that's an entire file sucks.

> This seems to break that fundamental paradigm and makes the language more complicated

Welcome to the last 10+ years of Java. They're trying to play catch-up to other languages that made fundamentally different and better choices, making Java more and more complicated in the process. They are so deeply entrenched in the enterprise back end space that programmers put up with it, nay, even feel grateful for it. People who are stuck using Java for the rest of their careers are happy to see it grow to accommodate 21st century programming techniques, even if it means that it becomes so complicated and crufty that no beginner will touch it ever again.

In java's defense -- and I share your criticisms -- it offers some very nice things that no other language has.

eg want to run code for 6 months at a go managing hundreds of gigs of data, tens of thousands of threads, at high load, with sustained gigs a second of garbage generation? the jvm will just silently tick away doing just that while being nearly bulletproof. As much as I love ruby and python, you ain't doing that with them.

With hot code loading, introspection, etc. All the stuff that makes developing super-robust long-lived systems way easier.

And the flip side of the clunky language is your code from 20 years ago still works.

Also, conservative feature adoption works in the long term.

Scala mainstreamed a bunch of concepts that java was slow to adopt, but the end result was java only took the good ideas and didn't take the bad ideas.

Fortunately, you don't have to use Java to use the JVM. There's Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, etc., all of which are simpler languages.

It doesn't surprise me; that sounds exactly like how C++ has progressed (sans the enterprise beans, hopefully).

10+ years ago I considered myself proficient at C++. It made sense, I didn't mind the pointers, and while the std library still felt clunky, it was fine. But I tabled these skills, and they indeed rusted a bit, but surely I could bring them out when needed again, right?

Smart pointers with multiple variants, judicious use of macros, rampant use of double colons to ensure proper namespace resolution (which IMHO makes the code an absolute eyesore), to name a few. I won't argue these changes aren't necessary, but it isn't pretty.

> Global namespace soup

Packages still exist.

It’s just not necessary to add an additional level of namespacing.

Statics never were some pure OOP anyway.