I would not have objected to releasing this change in Java 1.7. But releasing it in a BUG FIX RELEASE causes me to lose confidence in the maintainers of the JVM. One of the reasons that large companies like mine build in Java is because of Sun's long history of extremely careful attention to backward compatibility. Oracle is no Sun.
100% right. Sun were psychotically obsessed with maintaining a completely stable and reliable and predictable platform for both the JVM & Solaris. This went out the window with Oracle for the sake of "innovation". The number of major incidents caused by cavalier changes in 1.6 & 1.7 is ridiculous. Youd be hard pushed to even find anything worse than a documentation formatting bug in 1.5.
Tbh, though, it's a "damned if you do" scenario: pre-acquisition, all talk was about the glacial pace of evolution in the Java world and how things were just not progressing. Oracle started releasing hard and fast, and now people complain it's too much and too buggy. Can't please everyone...
You must be kidding. Up until 1.6 I had regressions on even the minor releases. Since oracle took over I update without even thinking about it. And I've been delivering desktop apps since 1.1.8
I've been programming in Java since Java 1.1.8 and I hazily recall several regression problems under Sun's stewardship. My gut feeling is that the rate of regressions in Java updates has remained steady.
If the rate has increased significantly under Oracle's stewardship, this is something I'd like to write about in my Java newsletter.
Do you have some statistics to demonstrate that regressions have become substantially worse since Oracle took over Java? I'd happily acknowledge you as a source!
I don't think that is fair 1.5 introduced the enum keyword.
That was not a fun change in a codebase I worked on. Java 6 and later are more sticklers in what is allowed by the api contacts and not breaking those than in the sun days.
