I still can open my decade-old Java projects, run build with modern Maven/JDK and get working code - in a few minutes. Two hours of dancing with a drum doesn’t feel acceptable to me.
Try any old Spring project, where anything newer than JDK 8 will be incompatible. The only saving grace is that JDK 8 is still available, but even it will eventually reach EOL. And then you look at JDK 11 projects and realize that they won't run on anything newer due to Lombok issues, so that's another thing to update and fix.
I think the experience of code rot is universal and increases with the amount of dependencies you have.
This is true but there's also a factor from the language/framework in use. Node is especially bad because of it generates huge package dependency trees. Go is especially good because of the large stdlib (which I use to minimize deps in https://github.com/contribsys/faktory) and excellent backwards compatibility.
Come on… compare it with what java and python have.
They do have syslog though https://pkg.go.dev/log/syslog
Tell me a single thing that Oracle has added to the standard library. As far as I can tell, more and more of what was once standard is now getting offloaded and trademark-washed with the eclipse and apache foundations.
The company I work at has a ton of projects stuck on ancient spring versions and Java 8 (or Java 6 in one instance). They still insist on Spring despite being essentially unable to upgrade to a version newer than a decade old.
That's the reality of using the language in production projects.
Same as how you're likely to see more than just Python or Node being used in projects that list them in the tech stack, because there's native dependencies and tooling used.
My son found a disk with some of my old java project from college 20 years ago and that's about what it took to run them, first figuring out how to even download java and then making some minor changes to get them running. I think we gave up trying to get the actual applet based ones to run.
You also need a browser that has NPAPI. IE 11 was the most modern browser I am aware of that still supported applets.
The old GUI framework mentioned in the GP might have been Swing. It is still included in most JDKs and allows for cross platform desktop GUI application development with no other dependencies outside the JDK. Finding documentation on how to do GUIs in Swing is getting increasingly difficult though.
Haven't used javaFX for a while but this is worth a shot
There are a very small number of projects that specifically make it their goal to be backwards-compatible effectively indefinitely, and Maven is one of those. It's part of what people who hate it hate about it, but for others it's the main selling point.
And Maven is a package manager for Java. The main difference IMO? The usual way to do things in Maven is to always use exact versions for the dependencies. When I specify I want some dependency at version 1.2.3, Maven will use version 1.2.3 of that dependency even if 1.2.4 or later already exists.
It will not build all old projects out of the box, of course. Specific versions of plugins may not be compatible with it or some dependencies may break on modern JDK. But chances of hitting this issue are much lower than in JS/NPM ecosystem.
That’s the usual way to do things in most teams working on app code I’ve been a part of (as opposed to library code where version ranges are preferable).
`cmake ..` otoh, tends not to.