In 2020 I became a full time Java developer, coming from a infrastructure role where I kind of dealt with Java code, but always as artifacts I managed in application servers and whatnot.

So when I first started dealing with the actual code, it scared me that the standard json library was basically in maintenance mode for some years back then. The standard unit test framework and lot of other key pieces too.

I interpreted that as “Java is dying”. But 6 years later I understand: they were are feature complete. And fast as hell, and god knows how many corner cases covered. They were in problem-solved, 1-in-a-billion-edge-cases-covered feature complete state.

Not abandoned or neglected, patches are incorpored in days or hours. Just… stable.

All is quiet now, they are used by millions, but remain stable. Not perfect, but their defects dependable by many. Their known bugs now features.

But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go then node the JavaScript the typescript.

There must be something inherently human about changing and rewriting things.

There is indeed change in the Java ecosystem, but people just choose another name and move on. JUnit, the battle tested unit testing framework, had a lot to learn from new ways of doing, like pytest. Instead of perturbing the stableness, they just choose another name, JUnit5 and moved on.