Java's Cover (April 2001)

&#62; <i>9. It's designed for large organizations. Large organizations have different aims from hackers.</i><p>This is where I think pg's bias steered him wrong. Hackers tend not to like Java (although that is less the case now with the JVM ecosystem being what it is), but hackers do not solely determine the success of technology. Furthermore, the type of hacker that pg is interested in—the lisper, the 10Xer, the startup founder—are in limited supply. Certainly they wield more influence per capita, but they still need critical mass to form a stable community around an open source platform in order to compete with large organizations. If you're looking to build a product or a small scale project, by all means find yourself a Grade-A hacker.<p>If you want to make the next ubiquitous programming platform though, there are other qualities that are necessary. Consensus building is probably the most important skill that large organizations have that hackers will struggle with at scale. If you have a ton of management and mediocre programmers, it's easier to at least get them moving in the same direction, and they'll be more tolerant of the foibles of a designed-by-committee language. Sun had the perfect storm of strong technical talent to design a solid language, but also the large organization effects to market a new platform to enterprise decision makers.<p>In a way I think pg's smell test might be more valid for an earlier era. He underestimated the influence of the mediocre programming armies, probably because back in the old days there weren't as many and they weren't as mediocre. This is just speculation on my part, but I have to imagine that the quality of the average programmer as declined over time as the numbers and appearance as a recognized career path have increased. I mean how many people were programmers in the 70s because they're parents thought that's what they should go to school for?

It is very interesting and worth pointing out that in the beginning of the essay says<p><i>So, just in case it does any good, let me clarify that I'm not writing here about Java (which I have never used) but about hacker's radar (which I have thought about a lot).</i><p>Most of the comments here on HN have been about Java and not about hackers' radars. This is not necessarily bad but it is interesting. I've seen lots of examples of this politics but not on a topic about technology. Does the topic of programming languages have the same sort of emotional sensitivity that politics does?

Coming from a Perl and C++ background, Java was great because the designers dared to remove so many features from the language. In that sense, it made the efforts of the coders stand out more than the features of the language. This is an important message to an up-and-coming hacker.<p>That said, Java is far from an ideal language. It lacks many features and is somewhat clunky.<p>It does do a few things right, though. It hits a sweet spot being both simplistic and fast. By choosing a single packaging, developers could use all features everywhere, and start to rely on them. I think it certainly gave a boost to concurrent programming. IMO, Java also drove the acceptance of GC:ed languages.<p>Now that Java has stagnated, I think that it is time for many old Javaites to abandon ship and transition to new languages. Perhaps it's best to let Java be. Leave it as a historical language that had its glory days. Perhaps someone will admire it for what it's designers dared to do. Perhaps for what it did for the community. Or perhaps new up-and-coming coders can look in those old code-bases and see some retro-style simplistic beauty.

I like Java - and I say this as someone who mostly used Python for the last 10 years (I learned other languages for fun, but did most "productive" work in Python).<p>My main issue with Java a decade ago was all the bloat in the framework. Want to write a Web application? Just use J2EE and write a few factory factories. Or use the "lightweight" Spring alternative, that allows you to write plenty of XML code.<p>This bloat got much better during the recent years and a number of sane frameworks have evolved. Want to write a Web service? Use Dropwizward. A Web application? There's the Play framework.<p>Java as a language is pretty nice. Yes - it has its warts, but the language is relatively simple to understand and isn't missing too many important features (Lambdas would be nice). In addition the type system really helps a lot when having larger codebases. Yes - it's not perfect (type erasure, ...), but it mostly does its job.

"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp."<p>Dazzling argumentative prowess. If I wrote that, I'd be called a troll and downvoted for senseless flaming.<p>Historically people making baseless judgements like that have been proven to be wrong.

I'll say it ... I love Java (and I'd been hacking in a for a couple years when PG wrote his article).<p>I came from an embedded systems background and treated the JVM as my machine. I read and understood the JVM specification, and then the language specification. By that time it wasn't any different to me than writing for a uP or uC. At that time, Java was a fast-growing eco-system and our JUG met twice a month to keep up.<p>While this was happening, I knew a lot of people like PG who <i>did</i> judge the book by its cover (and there were parts of the cover I didn't like). Don't be so hard on him as he admitted he never cracked it open.<p>Out of curiousity, have any of the YC start-ups used Java? I'm curious whether he's still biased against it. (We can count JVM languages for half points).

The title of the submission is a bit misleading.<p>PG explicitly states in the essay that it's not that much on Java itself but rather on the way hackers judge technologies (the "hacker radar" in his expression).<p>And these are not quite predictions but statements on how Java is (or was then back in 2001) perceived.<p>And I think, IMHO, a substantial part of the Java success today should be attributed to the JVM, not so much to Java, the language. Clojure/Scala/etc. are kind of clues for this.

For the <i>Dune</i> fans out there...<p>Java and the JVM ecosystem strike me as very much like the programmers "Golden Path". That is (for those not familiar with <i>Dune</i>), Java represents a sort of "forced peace". Yes, things work. Yes, tools are available. Yes, there is decent, even good, documentation.<p>No...nobody's happy about it. But then Java also bred the JVM, and today we have "the Scattering" (another Dune reference), where hackers, honest-to-goodness <i>hackers</i>, have spread out from this forced peace to build a new world. One that, while it will not be as peaceful as the uniform world of Java, will ensure that the JVM remains relevant long into the future.

Well, <i>is</i> Java a clean, beautiful powerful language that people love programming in?

let me point to a comment made by PG yesterday when asked by thaumaturgy what it's like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people?<p><i>It's pretty grim. I think that's one of the reasons I write fewer essays now. After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads. The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example. I essentially anticipated all the "No, what I said was" type comments I'd have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay. It's a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum. It's like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.</i><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497691" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497691</a><p>Maybe we should be discussing the future of finance, crowdsourced funding, new programming paradigms or some other interesting forward looking stuff instead of spending our time looking backwards trying to poke holes in an essay written more than ten years ago.

<p><pre><code> &#62; a hunch that it [Java] won't be a very successful language </code></pre> He lists COBOL as a bad language - but it's been very successful. So I think he's not really writing about "success", but about what hackers like. Interpreted this way, he's accurate: hackers <i>don't</i> like Java.<p>Businesses like investments that keep returning value - for languages, that means compatibility and portability. Hackers like to change things - expressiveness and power. Java code from years ago still works; it's also portable across machines and OSes. In contrast, ruby broke my simple toy code, after just a few months, in a minor point-release. Similarly, I believe there are many incompatible versions of lisp, and many hackers write their own libraries rather than reuse, so there's little standardisation. Different things are valued.<p>So I agree with pg's theme that if businesses like it, hackers won't. (There's some factual inaccuracies in the rest, but that wasn't his point.)

I'm probably going to get flamed for this but I think even for it's time, it's wrong on a few accounts and it stinks of elitism and an "I am better than thou" attitude rather than a discussion on relative merits or the preface which was slapped on to change the context. It sounds like it's written by someone who's comfortable status quo is threatened.<p>Ubiquitous readily available knowledge is power, not elitist hackerism...

I've always felt that it's a language designed to help eliminate the worst of programming, which has the side-effect of limiting some of the best programming.<p>So great for big businesses, but poor for hackers wanting to do cool stuff.

First off I must say that I like reading about past predictions. It can provide insights into how well current predictions may pan out in the future.<p>It interesting that all the points made 11 years ago can still be made today, with the exceptions of #1("It has been so energetically hyped") and #8("It's pseudo-hip"). I guess it's true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That's one I hadn't read, although sadly I agree with much of it. As one of the people who worked on the 'LiveOak' project which was the final, and presumptively last gasp, of Java before Sun 'redeployed' all of us, there was this really modest view of what the language was. And then it was released and folks started saying "Gee if people deliver programs in the browser, and Sun owns the language/environment of the browser, they are going to freeze Microsoft right out of the market, brilliant!"<p>Except nobody who was actually a part of the Java group said that, they said "Gee you can push a chemical molecule viewer to the browser at the same time you push a model, that will let you publish stuff without having to wait for browsers to 'catch up'"<p>Sun corporate had their own ideas though, and seeing it as a way to 'attack Microsoft' (which looked pretty unassailable in 1995) and a lot of other people were feeling the same way, and the language got hijacked. That was a sad thing indeed. I feel sorry for the developers who create a technology that is perceived as the way to 'kill Apple' or 'kill Google' since it will be very popular and ultimately corrupted by those who would seek to use it in that role. I have the misfortune of having worked on something which Sun tried to kill Microsoft with and Oracle tried to damage Google with. 2 for 2, yuck.<p>So if you can separate the language from the politics, there is a lot to like, it has been influential in a number of positive ways. But the taint on the language from the politics will be its most enduring legacy I suspect.

"No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java."<p>I love Java. I loved Smalltalk until 1996, then I read Java White Paper and VM Specification and I fell in love with Java and I am still loving it more than any other programming language. I programmed in Basic, Assembler, Pascal, Oberon, C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby (on Rails) and used many technologies. Smalltalk was my love from 1992 until 1996...<p>I could write a lot about why do I love Java. If somebody is interested, I can explain...<p>"People are forced to use it. ... if the technology was good, they'd have used it voluntarily."<p>I am using it voluntarily for all my projects more than 15 years now. I even migrated all my programs from other languages to Java... I am regularly checking new programming languages - recently I tried out Dart and Go - and I still can not find a better programming language for me... Java is still Nr. 1!<p>I confess: I love Java. :-)

I built a new programming language in scheme, wrote a compiler in C, map reduces in C++. I hate struts, hibernate and all shitty enterprise frameworks but I can proudly say that I love Java. I have used it for Speech synthesis, Image processing, Machine Learning, NLP and of-course Search. It's awesome.

Java is horrible for prototyping, it's designed for large environments where management of complexity (through interfaces and some level of top down design) is desirable.<p>It's not a hacker language.<p>PG makes a very good point though - that today's teenagers (hackers?) are tomorrows CEOs. But not everyone can be above average, not every CEO can be of a technology company, and eventually those CEOs need to hire average programmers to do basic enterprise information systems work.<p>Scala on the JVM with play framework is looking pretty agile these days too

The only prediction he made is that he would personally not like to program in it and that he could safely ignore it. I think that prediction has come true. He ignored it and that had no detrimental effect on him. Not ignoring it would probably not have had a benefit.<p>He didn't say that Java will die, that some people won't benefit from it, that useful things won't be made from it.<p>It's way too large for some good not to come out of it.

I've become really fond of Groovy during the last weeks. It's compatible with the huge number of existing Java code but more terse. Also its defaults seem more pragmatic, e.g., "==" comparing Strings by value or implicit setters/getters. And version 2 promises Java like performance (and type checks) for statically compiled code.

Another thought just struck me - a friend was relaying his thoughts on Java/JVM vs other languages. Again, related to pg's wrappers, the core thought was "Java as a language was more designed for the computer than a developer. Something like perl was more designed for a developer rather than the computer". The point was more expository than that, but that's stuck with me. Static languages in general seem to be that way, whereas dynamic langs (perl, ruby, php, etc), will make operations much simpler for a dev to implement, even at the expense of speed/clarity to the underlying os/vm. Perhaps there's more nuance here that I'm missing, or perhaps this 'wrapper' fits inside one of pg's wrappers already?

I believe that PG is totally right in this one.<p>Android uses java not because it has been decided by the hackers but because of a top-down decision from a big organization. It made strategic and economic sense for them.<p>All big organizations love java and most programmers are not hacker geniuses, they just want to pay the rent. So most programmers(in number) use java or C#.<p>I use Java a lot, but is so bloated, slow and "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." But it brought VMs to the table and that was a good contribution as it is really useful for some applications. Now that you could do that on C or C++ with LLVM but is easier on java.<p>For a simple proof of concept I will use java, or python, when I 'm serious I will use c, c++ or obj c.

Java might appear to be more successful than the (2001) article suggests, but it is geared towards java "the language." Its not a great language, but has found itself at the right place at the right time to address certain technical concerns (a "better" C++ at a time alternatives were being sought, concurrency with the rise of multi-core processing).<p>Java "the platform" (the JVM) has been a bigger focus in recent days especially with additional language support (JRuby, Jython, Clojure, Groovy, Scala). This support has been expanded in each recent release and seems to be the basis for the majority of the articles that appear on HN (or at least that I notice).

Where do you find Go in 2012. It is also sponsored by a large organization.

Having developed in Java for years, I agree with some of the points which PG has predicted 11yrs ago!<p>That said, using Java is sort of a insurance policy.<p>1. It's easy to find developers. _Sometimes_ easier to outsource modules. 2. It's usually hard to make mistakes in Java (you can screw up, if you want to) - mainly due to great tooling and excellent time-tested frameworks which help a tonne. 3. Has good complementary languages (Scala, Groovy, JRuby..), which interop well with other frameworks at large. 3. JVM does black-magic for you.<p>I guess committee did make a decent pick then.

Indeed this as an interesting topic; however, I think that many missed the point of the essay altogether. He wasn't saying that Java is a horrible language just that it's not viewed favorably by "hackers". I think that he is probably right but I didn't know he spoke for hackers everywhere. Java is just another tool in the box that almost everyone has to use at some point. Is it ideal? No. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it fun to write software with? Sometimes. I spend most of my days writing Python code with either Django or Pyramid and also have problems with it from time to time. Though I consider Python my "favorite" language it's far from perfect! All languages/platforms have their problems and tradeoffs and there is little you can do about it other than create your own.<p>Just because Java is not viewed favorably by some random sample of hackers that pg may or may not know doesn't mean it's not an effective language. Hell, I think C and C++ are both horrible but I have to use them sometimes and while its not ideal for me it is what it is. If you wanna get paid, you'll use what you have to. (Joel Spolsky cover your eyes) I went to a Java school to computer science [GASP!] and it was fine. I already knew how to code so it was just a formality for me; however now that I'm looking at Android development I'm glad that I learned some Java along the way. A hacker is a hacker no matter what language they use and most programmers are not good enough to be called hackers anyway.<p>Predictions are very much like arses; everyone has them and they usually stink.

Okay, I think I fit the "hacker" name (whatever that is) as well as anyone.<p>And for my next project, easily the most ambitious I've undertaken, I'm working on the JVM.<p>If you'd asked me three years ago if I'd ever write Java code, the answer would be no.<p>I don't really write Java though – I'm mostly using Scala, along with a couple of libraries that were written in Java, that I patch (e.g. Cassandra).<p>Point is, hackers <i>are</i> choosing the JVM today, whether its Scala, Clojure, Groovy, or JRuby, Jython, and the like. And having Java in the mix, from my perspective, is not at all bad. It means there's <i>tonnes</i> of relatively usable libraries out there, that are easy to tweak without breaking things, that have had plenty of time to bake.<p>The Java classloader mechanism is kind of nasty when it's paired with application servers, but consider on its own, it's allowing us to do live rollouts of new applications written in Scala without restarting the JVM. (We don't use an application server, we effectively wrote our own.)<p>Akka is like Erlang-light, and paired with Scala, makes the kinds of things people are wanting to do with Node.js (which I ported to Solaris, along with v8) easier, faster, and safer.<p>tl;dr Hackers <i>are</i> starting to choose the JVM, and the modern languages built on top of it (Scala, Groovy, Clojure) and the huge base of existing Java libs is making that possible -- just like the huge base of C/C++ libs made choosing Python, Ruby, or Perl reasonable a decade ago.

Quite good points except the major one : "I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language"

"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp."<p>They might not be the most beautiful languages ever invented, but they power a great deal of real-world applications. If people managed to write useful software with those, I consider that a success.<p>On the other hand, I probably never used or depended on any software written in Smalltalk in my life.

Hmm... Android uses java. Therefore, Android smells suspicious?

I actually like Java very much and am tremendously productive with it. It's a simple language and simplicity helps in many areas. It got many things right. It has a comprehensive standard library. Threading is excellent. Performance is excellent. Typing is helpful.<p>Its support for functional programming is lacking, which is why a lot of people from fp background have a dim view of it.

I love C++ and I know guys who love Java. And they are great systems programmers. I have nothing against Java the language (I do dislike the focus on OOP), but do have issues with JVMs (I prefer real machines rather than virtual ones), however, I would not say that no one loves Java. It has a place and is useful, and is appreciated, by many.

After reading this I'm completely convinced that Go will be one of the world's most used languages within a decade.

It's never been a loved language, but there it is, pretty much all over the place so many years later. I wouldn't have guessed that either!<p>I'd be more interested in reading on well-rehearsed, <i>current</i> predictions about Java. Many enterprises are starting to consider (mostly JVM-based) alternatives these days.

I remember java from 1998/99, and by 2001 was getting the 'you should do java' routine from some colleagues. "why?" "there's so many jobs out there for it - it must be better!" That seems very much like another 'wrapper' pg is talking about.<p>I remember my immediate reaction was "there may be more jobs because it's takes twice as many people to write similar code as many other languages". In some ways I still feel that. The open source ecosystem around the JVM now does allow a much different level of productivity than the JVM offered in 1998. However, when I have to drop down to just plain-old-java, I'm reminded of how verbose and clunky the language is. When using the JVM, I'm typically on Groovy using some great Apache libs and such, both of which tend to shield the clunk away. :)

Personally I don't think the accuracy or inaccuracy (both are debatable) of the opinion is that interesting, and I've run a Java Users Group for over 12 years. I felt the article is much more interesting as a look inside a hacker's head as to what non-technical factors influence his/her opinions (and ultimately decisions) about a technology. I wrote a blog post breaking down his reasoning for the 'stink' and how those are/aren't applicable to today's software landscape. <a href="http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/09/11/howhackerschoosetools/" rel="nofollow">http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/09/11/howhackerschoosetools/</a> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510455" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510455</a> to discuss on HN

I just started a thread for HNers that would like to meet at JavaOne - see <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504803" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504803</a> for a discussion of time and place.

I'm not sure I find much to quibble with in the essay. In fact I find it almost prescient. Having worked with Java in an enterprise setting for over 12 years almost everything in that essay rings true. As we are acutely aware the enterprise beast moves to a very different beat - namely the vendors looking to make their numbers for the year. You're an IBM shop or a Microsoft shop. The decision's been made for you. And there's nothing wrong with that. As someone else pointed out, you're buying tooling, support and in the case of IBM - hardware. It is the almost the COBOL of this generation.

I don't think he's <i>wrong</i> in any sense of the word when he wrote it. From the opening he's very forward about his "hacker radar".<p>From a hacker perspective, Java is typically a poor choice. But it didn't succeed on hacker merits so much as it did on sponsorship and forward pushing from business types. Any competent programmer who has been in the field for long enough sees Java's issues and strengths and can judge it impartially but I'd be hard off to find a single one that felt it was the "best" language by any means.

Like or dislike Java, it has changed and transformed enterprise software fundamentally and remains one of the top used languages in the world.<p>And I thought it would happen the way it did.<p>Python was already around back then in 1994, but nobody cared because Java had Duke and was being pushed as the new idiom for everything networked.<p>Hacker's radar is a valuable instinct, but when a reputable commercial entity acts as a wise custodian, behind a technology with technical merit, effort can easily trigger and accelerate grass root adoption.

Back in school days I learned about programming paradigms, programming language technologies and cutting edge research on programming languages. I learned Java and also Haskell. Most of my class mates including all the teachers knew this that any industry grade language needs to provide multi-paradigm support out of box or it'll die. If a species is not adaptable to its environment, it'll die. And Java is one of those species.

Why's this ancient text from the canon of Graham getting resubmitted? So we can all have a good laugh? So the readers of this site can have a big argument over the definition of "success"? "Sure Java sees a lot of use by clueless corporations, but teh haxors disdain it, therefore it's a failure!" Incidentally, Google can be added to the list of big dummies who use Java.

Right premises wrong conclusion. Most of the things PG says about Java are true but his conclusion that it wont be successful is completely wrong. Java is not a darling of hackers for all the reasons he has mentioned but it is embraced by large organizations for the very same reasons PG mentions which means there is huge market of job for Java coders if not hackers.

These predictions are correct, for the values of popularity and world pg and HN deal with. Startups.<p>The thing not cleary stated (or possibly understood) is that "large organizations" far out strip startups in number of employees, amount of code written, advertising budgets. And Java is very popular in "large organizations".

I wholeheartedly agree with him - I wish I had read this essay in 2001, I wish every Java developer, especially whose who were live in US, had read it. There was nothing wrong of Java in 2001, but, you should have caught the smell of corporate, protocol, committee, process, outsourcing, offshoring ...

<i>"I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful"</i><p>As a general case, the first thing which struck me when rereading this essay was the way in which Graham's writing style (and his draft readers' editing) has improved. Today, a similarly structured essay would clearly answer the question, "Successful how?"

I think he has a lot of good points. I think if they would finally stop teaching Java in CS and other IT-related educations and Android would get proper support for other languages, Java(language) would slowly fade away.

While this rings true after all these years, had it not been for Java those of us living in the midwest would have either had to move away or spend the intervening years coding in VB6.

Except for the parts where he predicted Java's failure and FreeBSD's dominance, I see no big problem. He even predicted Sun's fate.

&#62; 4. No one loves it.<p>I think he got that one right: none of my colleagues who write Java are that much into it. They just have to.

&#62; So far, Java seems like a stinker to me. I've never written a Java program

Please add the date...

*2001

Java-the-language filled a need for some time, and there's a lot of value staked on the JVM, but Java-the-culture needs to die, and the sooner the better.<p><a href="http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/java-shop-politics/" rel="nofollow">http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/java-shop-pol...</a>