I first learned about Java in the late 90s and it sounded fantastic. “Write once, run anywhere!” Great!
After I got past “Hello world!” and other simple text output tutorials, things took a turn for the worse. It seemed like if you wanted to do just about anything beyond producing text output with compile-time data (e.g. graphics, sound, file access), you needed to figure out what platform and which edition/version of Java your program was being run on, so you could import the right libraries and call the right functions with the right parameters. I guess that technically this was still “write once, run anywhere”.
After that, I learned just enough Java to squeak past a university project that required it, then promptly forgot all of it.
I feel like Sun was trying to hit multiple moving targets at the same time, and failing to land a solid hit on any of them. They were laser-focused on portable binaries, but without standardized storage or multimedia APIs at a time when even low-powered devices were starting to come with those capabilities. I presume that things are better now, but I’ve never been tempted to have another look. Even just trying to get my machines set up to run other people’s Java programs has been enough to keep me away.
What I noticed right away was: It’s the ugliest hello world ever. It’s the slowest hello world ever. (For a long time it was also the record size hello world at something like 64MB, but that’s later and on a compiler.) And it doesn’t actually run on any platform except one: jre. And most binaries you find only run on one version of that one brand of jre.
Still, not the worst thing for writing web services in in late 90s. Doesn’t matter how slow it starts or how much space it takes. Responding to requests, being familiar to new programmers and living in a sandbox was enough.
I first learned about Java in the late 90s and it sounded fantastic. “Write once, run anywhere!” Great!
After I got past “Hello world!” and other simple text output tutorials, things took a turn for the worse. It seemed like if you wanted to do just about anything beyond producing text output with compile-time data (e.g. graphics, sound, file access), you needed to figure out what platform and which edition/version of Java your program was being run on, so you could import the right libraries and call the right functions with the right parameters. I guess that technically this was still “write once, run anywhere”.
After that, I learned just enough Java to squeak past a university project that required it, then promptly forgot all of it.
I feel like Sun was trying to hit multiple moving targets at the same time, and failing to land a solid hit on any of them. They were laser-focused on portable binaries, but without standardized storage or multimedia APIs at a time when even low-powered devices were starting to come with those capabilities. I presume that things are better now, but I’ve never been tempted to have another look. Even just trying to get my machines set up to run other people’s Java programs has been enough to keep me away.
What I noticed right away was: It’s the ugliest hello world ever. It’s the slowest hello world ever. (For a long time it was also the record size hello world at something like 64MB, but that’s later and on a compiler.) And it doesn’t actually run on any platform except one: jre. And most binaries you find only run on one version of that one brand of jre.
Still, not the worst thing for writing web services in in late 90s. Doesn’t matter how slow it starts or how much space it takes. Responding to requests, being familiar to new programmers and living in a sandbox was enough.