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Comment by another_twist | Hacker News Reader

I understand the sarcasm but this take is devoid of fact. Modern Java loads fast, Java 21 has pretty good functional programming featurez. The ecosystem churns out language level features at a pace and a budget that would put most large funded startups to shame.

Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP. They didn't figure out startup times for 10+ years, they were busy dealing with Oracle and its messy management. I think it will simply continue to get better given that Java has endured through so many language fads. It has its ways to go but it will end up like SQL - here before we were alive and will be here when most of us are dead.

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Mostly agreed that Java, warts and all, has gotten better, and will stick around. It's the new COBOL, for better or worse. (I still wouldn't want to use it voluntarily, but if someone pays me enough money, sure.)

However:

> Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP.

The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Financial transactions dwarf GDP by so much that even a bit player of a technology will facilitate more transactions than global GDP.

(And that's fine. Many of these transactions are offsetting, and that it's a sign of an efficient market that the mispricings are so small that participants needs giant gross flows to profit from them.

Somewhat related: a single high capacity fire hose (at about 75kg of water per second) moves about the same number of electrons as you'd need to power the total US electricity consumption at 120V. Obviously, your fire hose also sprays plenty of pesky protons which completely offset the electrical current from the electrons.)

> The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly.

Agreed. I guess its comparing production capacity to distribution capacity. Distribution capacity will equal n_tx * tx_amt. Having said that, another metric to look at is how much of software infrastructure is built on Java. Simply adding AWS to this equation proves the value added by Java backed systems. Hard to say that about any other langauge. Also we can look at versatility, Java is used to write very large data processing systems, CDN networks, API servers and even widely used consumer apps (IntelliJ products). Its very hard to find any other language that has had an outsized impact across domains. Of course the counter being Linux written on C powers all of the internet. True but C doesnt have the cross domain impact that Java has had.

So I disagree with the assessment that Java is a terrible langauge performance or productivity wise or it wouldnt have had this impact.

You could easily say the same about C/C++, as the operating systems and most databases are written in the language(s).

There's zero sarcasm in my comment.

The JVM is quite different from Java language features or Scala language features. I've written entire programs in JVM bytecode, without a compiler, and I see very little of value in it. A stack based machine? Why? Not a huge blocker, it's weird, but usable. The poor engineering around the JVM for many use cases? That's a blocker for me, and where are the alternatives in implementation that don't have the atrocious launch performance and interface for specifying class path and jars?

Java may be used a lot, but so is Windows. It's an accident of history, of early adoption and network effects, rather than being inherently good technology. Java, the language, made a very wide and broad swath of programmers productive, just as Windows lets a very wide and broad set of IT people run IT systems, without having to learn as much or know as much as they would need to with, say, Linux. But Java's low-barrier-to-entry is quite distinct from the weaknesses of the JVM...

> Java may be used a lot, but so is Windows. It's an accident of history, of early adoption and network effects, rather than being inherently good technology.

Going on a tangent: Windows is an interesting example to bring up, because the Windows versions everyone uses today have about as much to do with the 'accident of history / early adoption' versions that were based on DOS as using Wine on Linux has.

It would perhaps be like today's JVM being register based, when the first version were stack based.

I don't actually know how much the JVM has changed over time.

> A stack based machine? Why?

The JVM being a stack-machine is probably the least controversial thing about it. Wasm, CPython and Emacs all also have a stack-based bytecode language. The value, of course, comes from having a generic machine that you can then compile down into whatever machine code you want. Having a register machine doesn't seem very useful, as it's completely unnecessary for the front-end compiler to minimize register usage (the backend compiler will do that for you).

Specifying classpath isn't fun, I agree with that. Launch performance isn't good, and is generally a consequence of its high degree of dynamicism and JIT compiler, though of course there are ways around that (Leyden).

> I've written entire programs in JVM bytecode, without a compiler, and I see very little of value in it

I agree, I also see very little value in manually writing JVM bytecode programs. However, compiling into the JVM classfile format? Pretty darn useful.

> Having a register machine doesn't seem very useful...

Requires fewer instructions, so potentially faster evaluation, which is good for short-lived programs that ends before the JIT kicks in.

Stack machines requires less space per instruction, however, which reduces the size of the program (faster to load).

> I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

I see what you mean. In that case we can add Scala backed systems as well to the JVM balance sheet. If we simply look at the JVM and the systems it backs, there's very little evidence that it isnt a marvel of technology. It powers more impactful systems than few other technologies.

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