Ask HN: How much did Java cost | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much did Java cost

6 pointsabrax31416 comments

Is the some way to estimate how much a pl cost to develop (and continues to cost to support)?

A rough order of magnitude estimate would be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Java is nearly 30 years old and is widely used in enterprise backend systems, multi-platform desktop applications (e.g. IDEs, tools, games, etc.), and Android application development.

It did not get to where it is today without significant investments by large enterprise companies (Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Google, Amazon, Red Hat, IBM, etc.).

Many of those large enterprise companies are still deeply invested in Java and continue to support it in code / tooling contribtions and financial support. Java is the new COBOL and will likely continue to be used for the foreseeable future.

Thanks. To clarify (although you answered this anyway), I’m referring just to the core language support (and maybe very common non-core packed that are essentially core), not the infinity of all spin off development.

What are you defining as core language support?

The Java trademark covers both multiple editions and implementations.

Editions are target platforms, some of which are so different that they really should be their own programming languages such as:

* Java Card for smart-cards

* Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) for environments with limited resources

* Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) for workstation environments

* Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) for large distributed enterprise environments

The Java SE edition was released under the GNU GPL and receives contributions for multiple sources under the OpenJDk project. Most contributions come from large corporations, many of which also release OpenJDK-based Java distributions.

Many components that were previously part of Java SE and Java EE have been released under open source licenses and are now supported by community owners and contributers (e.g. JakartaEE and JavaX components, Eclipse and Netbeans IDEs and related tools).

It is a complex web of development and support depending on what you are considering, but millions of hours of work and excessive amounts of money have gone into it

Right. Well, good questions. If it was an easy question I wouldn’t have had to ask such an august community. :-)

But also, maybe Java is too complex. We could start from something simpler, like Haskell. Or js or cj.

>> We could start from something simpler, like Haskell. Or js or cj.

Someone familiar with those will need to answer.

I have not done any serious work with those languages so I am unable to reply.

A more reasonable estimate would be tens of billions. Even that may be an order of magnitude too low.

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