One of the last things I did before finishing at Mindera was to write a blog post, Why Java Still Matters. This piece begins by looking at the history of Java, particularly the wilderness years, which I’ve previously written about in my post on Bruce A Tate’s Beyond Java.
The Mindera piece goes on to argue that Java’s lack of sophistication, often seen as a weakness, is actually a strength. For me, Java is a more robust language than many of the alternatives – although new features are diluting this.
Java is now over a quarter of a century old. It emerged on a wave of hype in 1996, promising to be a programming language for the Internet. But, unfortunately, it very soon came to feel awkward and was mocked as a boring, corporate language. Ten years later, people were writing book-length obituaries for Java, suggesting that developers move on.
You can read the full post on the Mindera blog.
One thing I couldn’t quite squeeze into the post was a discussion of how applets were withdrawn. I’d have loved to add a link to Simon Ritter’s post No Longer the Applet of the Developer’s Eye, where he tries to run a 1996 demo in Java 8.