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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

You've had a very different experience of the past 13 years if you've experienced no major shifts. Even the past year has had a whole big change with the advent of LLMs, nevermind the rise of the web, VSCode, typescript, rust, and more.

In 2011, Java was on version 7. We're on 22 now in 2024. There have been some paradigm shifts in Java during that time. Streams (Java 8), Lambda expressions (Java 9), the var keyword (Java 10), Records (Java 14), switch and yield (Java 12/14), instanceof (Java 16). Functional programming over OOP; Cloud and microservices, emphasis on security, DevX, concurrency.

Code written in 2011 still runs, but the world's changed around it.

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> In 2011, Java was on version 7. We're on 22 now in 2024.

In the IDE technology, the jump was even larger. In 2011, I was using Intellij 10, now I'm on version 2024.

> There have been some paradigm shifts in Java during that time. Streams (Java 8), Lambda expressions (Java 9), the var keyword (Java 10), Records (Java 14), switch and yield (Java 12/14), instanceof (Java 16).

The only listed Java feature which represented a paradigm shift was lambda expressions (which were released in v8, not v9), the rest are minor features.

Streams had a pretty huge impact on how a lot of people write code.

Also, lambdas came in in 8, not 9. Streams without lambdas would have been pretty painful!

There were streams-like libraries before Java 8. It’s lambdas that made them more practical.

The rise of the web? In the past 13 years? Gosh does that make me feel old...

I imagine some of us reading this learned to program before bitnet was a thing. Punched cards. Paper tape. Booting by entering a lot of binary numbers with toggle switches. Good times. Oh, and that ancient Fortran code? It still works and, if you can see patterns in arithmetic-if blocks, it still expresses clever algorithms elegantly.

Shit, I learned to program before there was Google.

Reminds of a random comment or tweet I read somewhere where the person said their young children just couldn't believe she was so old that she was born before Google existed :D they just couldn't believe her :D so cute.

I studied OpenGL when all I could find was literally 1 tutorial on it and it was not in my native language.

What a world we must have lived in without VSCode, TS and rust, a truly undistinguishable one it seems.

concurrency is on your list why? DL added concurrency to Java long before 2011.

I remember using j.u.c in production back when it was still concurrent.jar. There were surprisingly many jobs in NYC/London circa 2006 if you had Core Java skills.

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