
Red Hat Replaces Oracle as OpenJDK 8, OpenJDK 11 Steward - Alupis
https://www.theserverside.com/news/252461945/Red-Hat-replaces-Oracle-as-OpenJDK-8-OpenJDK-11-steward
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Recurecur
"While still important and definitely not legacy, Java is not one of today's
growth technologies," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management
Associates in Boulder, Colo. "All of these traditional Java vendors should be
focusing on pivoting toward today's fast-growing stuff, such as Python,
JavaScript and Node.js."

That strikes me as a profoundly ignorant statement. Most of the value in the
Java ecosystem lies in the JVM. There are many languages running on it, Java
is only one. Java has improved a lot, but Scala and Kotlin both provide
alternatives with their own strengths. Clojure also has a vibrant community.

As more focus centers on datacenter efficiency, I suspect there will be a move
away from JS and Python as they both have performance limitations based on
design.

Java is much stronger in that regard, but it'll be interesting to see how the
newer AOT compiled languages do - Julia, Rust and Swift.

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beisner
Java is a fine language, and the JVM is a powerful environment that enables
some really cool things - Kotlin and Scala prime among them. That said, I
wouldn’t be surprised if we are past peak Java/JVM in terms of new projects
and developer mindshare. Java was an excellent tool for a world where
ecosystems were rather self-contained, lots of code had to be written in-
house, and source code distribution platforms and good tooling for cross-
language development weren’t nearly as prevalent. A developer could basically
do everything they needed in Java, unless they needed super-performant code,
in which case they’d drop to C/C++.

The proliferation of great new languages, stellar package managers, and
comprehensive tooling have reduced the need for a single, do-it-all language.
Now, there are a wide variety of languages that are better fit for specific
domains (I.e. Go is very good for small services, python is good for data
science and prototyping, rust is good for system programming, typescript is
good for Frontend, etc), and the barrier to entry for all of those languages
in a professional environment is lowering (if not already low). To me, this
means that the next generation of developers will be versed in several of
these more domain-specific languages, rather than spend their career working
with a single language. Java may well be one of these languages, but I see a
possibility that it will gradually fade out of mainstream greenfield
development. Of course, the world is now built on the JVM so it will stay for
a very long time, but maybe not for new projects.

~~~
pjmlp
Our agency does mainly Java, .NET, C++, JavaScript.

Any candidate needs to be very strong to warrant the respective department to
replace one of those pillars.

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narnianal
That's great news. I'm personally more a Python fan, but I see all around me
how good, stable enterprise problems are solved by Java coders. Last Java
version I used was still pre-Oracle, so I can't say if they did a good job or
not. But I can say when it comes to open source I have much more trust in Red
Hat as a company.

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webreac
At my work place, I have recently switched to java 8. As I do not like Oracle,
I really welcome the replacement of Oracle by Red Hat. Good ridance. I wish
java had nothing to do with Oracle.

~~~
IloveHN84
Why Java 8 and now directly 11 or 12? 8 is already at the end

~~~
Freak_NL
We are at JDK 8 now too and will move towards the next LTS (JDK 11) near the
end of the year. The transition from Java 8 to Java 11 feels more involved
than the transition from Java 7 to Java 8 was. Everything seems to work, but a
lot of major libraries are still throwing lots of warnings, and to really get
the most out of the transition developers and existing codebases should get
comfortable with the new module system as well.

Moving to a non-LTS release (12) is a non starter of course.

~~~
chipperyman573
>The transition from Java 8 to Java 11 feels more involved than the transition
from Java 7 to Java 8 was

I don't know a whole lot about Java 7 vs 8 vs 11, but wouldn't that make the
most sense? 7->8 is one version upgrade, 7->11 is 4.

~~~
pilif
9, 10 and 11 are following a new release schedule of timed releases (every 6
months), whereas 8 was still a traditional feature release.

I would say that aside of the module system that came with a huge list of now
inaccessible internal methods that a lot of dependencies relied on even though
they shouldn’t have, there was even more change between 7 and 8 than there was
between 8 and 11

~~~
Freak_NL
Yeah, Oracle changed what one major version upgrade meant from JDK 8 onwards.
For production purposes JDK 9 and 10 effectively don't exist.

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RickJWagner
It's nice to hear from Cameron Purdy and TheServerSide. Two important sources
of Dev Info from many years back. (Circa 2000 or so for TSS?)

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maxnoe
This is probably hinting at a similar announcment Red Hat will do on 1st
January 2019.

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maxnoe
2020 of course

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xvilka
While Java certainly has a value for a maintenance, because of the troves of
legacy projects, I am not sure why anyone would want to start a new project
with it. From Scala Native, Kotlin Native (closer to Java world) to Elixir
(Beam VM), from Rust to OCaml, from Go to F#, etc. I wish all these money and
efforts were directed to development of newer, better languages, rather than
reinforcing Java. I was pleasantly surprised to see that recently linked
Mercury startup uses Haskell.

~~~
EdwardDiego
I learned to code in Python, I loved Erlang, I dabble in Elixir when I can,
and I loved F#, and I code in Scala, Kotlin,Java, JS and Python in my day to
day work, depending on where in the codebase I am.

The things that are hard to beat about the Java world is the ecosystem, the
tooling and the package management. Stuff more or less works without too much
hassle, there's often a good library for what you want to do, and you're
building on decades of previous industry work.

In terms of package management, the most unreliable parts of our project are
Node and Python.

~~~
y4mi
in what way are they unreliable?

both can be proxy-cached on your local network to remove external
dependencies.

both have ... uuuh... okay package managers (poetry/pipenv for python,
npm/yarn for node) with *.lock files to properly define their dependencies.
How does this differ from maven/gradle?

honestly, i prefer the node/python package management. Maven/Gradle is just so
incredibly extensible making it insanely powerful.. But it comes at the cost
of complexity and developers being unable to actually understand whats
happening.

~~~
salex89
Because some guy in some library used by a library in an SDK I use didn't set
a fixed version for his dependency which has been updated and has a serious
bug in it... My app isn't working. Now I have to go through my requirements
and set the exact versions that worked last time we released, have an enormous
requirements file, and I'll probably never touch it again and have stale
dependencies. Yeah... I don't like pip

