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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

> It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people

This is the most misinformed take on what Java is used for I have seen on HN. Today Java is used by FAANG and other tech shops. It's employed in the enterprise, science and finance. What it is almost never used for is creating "cool web pages"

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Besides the point that it is 1996 and probably talking about applets, wouldn't spring boot backends fall into the modern interpretation of "mak[ing] cool web pages"? Sure, java is used for more, but the number of job ads led me to believe it is quite a substantial part of java development.

It’s a quote from 1996.

FAANG is basically just creating cool web apps, no? Point taken on science though. Also I think Java was dog slow at the time. Eventually hardware caught up.

I was also puzzled by this one. Does he mean Java applets maybe?

That’s exactly it, and led to activex in response.

Yes, they were a really big deal at the time, before security concerns came along and sunk them.

There was nothing inherently unsafe about Java Applets that could not have been fixed, security was simply not that important in the era for browsers.

Browsers didn't even have sandboxes then: fixing would have taken decades, and we still get sandbox escape vulns.

I remember applets being used for roll-over buttons on web pages and always knowing that an applet was being used because Internet Explorer 4 hung when loading the page, waiting for the JVM to fire up (with much disk churning).

Kind of nostalgic for it!

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