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Oracle Java Popularity Sliding, Reports New Relic (infoworld.com) 95

Posted by EditorDavid from the running-anywhere dept.
InfoWorld reports that "While still the industry's leading Java distribution, Oracle Java's popularity is half what it was just two years ago, according to a report from application monitoring company New Relic." (With the usual caveat that data from New Relic's report "was drawn entirely from applications reporting to New Relic in January 2022 and does not provide a global picture of Java usage,") The finding was included the company's 2022 State of the Java Ecosystem report, released April 26, which is based on data culled from millions of applications providing performance data to New Relic. Among Java Development Kit (JDK) distributions, Oracle had roughly 75% of the market in 2020, but just 34.48% in 2022, New Relic reported. Not far behind was Amazon, at 22.04%, up from 2.18% in 2020.

New Relic said its numbers show movement away from Oracle binaries after the company's "more restrictive licensing" of its JDK 11 distribution before returning to a more open stance with JDK 17, released in September 2021. Behind Oracle and Amazon were Eclipse Adoptium (11.48%), Azul Systems (8.17%), Red Hat (6.05%), IcedTea (5.38%), Ubuntu (2.91%), and BellSoft (2.5%).
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Oracle Java Popularity Sliding, Reports New Relic More

Oracle Java Popularity Sliding, Reports New Relic

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  • Once bitten, twice shy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @01:18AM (#62515792) Homepage Journal

    Does this surprise anyone? Oracle sent the Java community into a panic when they pulled their little "Java as a paid subscription" stunt. A lot of people who had never bothered looking outside the "official" Java JDK suddenly found themselves needing to. (Or maybe not, Oracle's licensing terms were very confusing, and the "base" JDK was probably always available without any fees, but no one wanted to take that chance.)

    Now people have reworked their entire Java system on the non-Oracle JDKs and are keeping their safe distance from Oracle. There's really no compelling reason to go "back" to the Oracle JDKs. Amazon's distribution is incredibly easy to use on AWS and is basically the OpenJDK (which I assume counts as "Oracle" in that chart) plus backported patches.

    Oracle shot themselves in the foot because they just couldn't help themselves from being - well - Oracle.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Amazon's distribution is incredibly easy to use on AWS

      Corretto works fine everywhere, not just AWS.

    • Most of the mentioned Java releases they mentioned are basically OpenJDK builds with just a few "patches" here and there.

    • Are there any unique features or value adds associated with Oracle Java; or did Team Larry severely overestimate how scared people would be of using one of the 3rd party JDKs?

      I assume that organizations up to their eyes in Oracle support agreements might have reason to be concerned about straying from the officially blessed version; but anyone in that sort of relationship with Oracle isn't the sort to be deterred by price of Oracle Java; and if you were never paying Oracle anything I can't imagine that t

      • Re:Once bitten, twice shy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @06:59AM (#62516114)

        anyone in that sort of relationship with Oracle isn't the sort to be deterred by price of Oracle Java;

        Actually, this was a big problem, a company has a business relationship with Oracle for some piece of software and by having that business relationship, Oracle audits you to find more to milk from them, I hear.

        One person I know complained because they said Oracle hit them for a bill for every desktop assuming they had Oracle JRE on them just because they found a java webstart link on some software from a third-party vendor. They never used that feature and didn't even have JREs on the desktop, but Oracle tried to claim that the webstart link wouldn't exist if they didn't have jres, and since oracle didn't find jres in the audit, then they must have worked to hide them ahead of the audit, and invoiced them a shit ton of money. Because of this phenomenon, not only were people avoiding the Oracle JRE like the plague (which by itself was 'trapware', download it like you usually did, but the licenses terms changed and boom, you open up your company to liability), but that vendor removed all java from it's product in a subsequent release to avoid such a happening in the future (it was long overdue to change to a more sane native web interface, and this was evidently the push they needed to finally get with the times).

        Most people I know won't give any Oracle products a second look. They have such a reputation for an outright antagonistic customer relationship, with the only way out to avoid anything with the word Oracle anywhere near.

        • I won't even willingly use OpenJDK or MariaDB.

          Anything that is or ever has been owned by Oracle is a potential lawsuit.

          This is not paranoia. I've been personally threatened by Oracle, and at a time when I was not using a single one of its products. Most of the companies I've worked for were forced to pay it extortion money at one point or another.

      • There are enterprise libraries that are basically locked in by Oracle and you can't access them without paying the licensing. But pretty much anything I've worked on works in OpenJDK and I haven't installed the Oracle binaries in over five years.

    • Yepp. Pretty much exactly this. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday May 09, 2022 @06:53AM (#62516096)

      Oracle done f*cked up with their job of being the herald of Java and they did so pretty much from the beginning.

      It's not that we don't have any alternative these days. That toy language JavaScript seems to be taking the throne and actually is doing the exact thing Java was initially intended for back in the 90ies. Google is super-pissed at Oracle for effing up their sh*t and threw it's weight behind Kotlin for Android and more recently Dart/Flutter for x-platform clients. MS did the TypeScript and VS Code thing ... yeah, dig this: a Free Open Source Produkt by *Microsoft* that is actually really *good*, *useful*, *cross-platform* and *works*. If someone would've said that would happen before it did they woul'd've be called a l00ny.

      In short, we have a massive variety of true FOSS alternatives to the Java ecosystem these days.
      Oracle dropped the ball on Java after they bought Sun, in a time when Java needed stability more than anything else.
      That they're seeing a decline in usage is of no surprise to me, that's entirely on them.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 )

        Java and JavaScript have nothing to do with each other..

        Dart/Flutter compiles to Java Bytecode on desktop platforms.

        You sound like one who gets his ideas about software from news papers.

      • Why are people OK with JavaScript whereas Java applets and later on Flash had to be expunged from the Web?

        Or will JavaScript someday be exiled for being a security attack surface?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          Perhaps, but it would take a lot of effort.

          Basically, there are two steps:

          1. You'd have to write a new scripting langauge that was high-performance with security by default that could be disabled inside code blocks, but was also as easy to write in as JS. This language would also need to have written for it a way to run/convert JavaScript in a way that was about as fast as a typical JavaScript engine, placing such translated code in a security-disabled block.

          2. You'd need to persuade/cajole/bribe/blackmail

          • Just to re-enforce your comment, this was the point of Dart. I'm sad that it failed at that job, but I don't think that a "perfect" language with amazing support could have displaced JavaScript either.

            The whole web tech stack is a mess IMO, as evident by the modern internet being nearly inaccessible to people who require screen readers.

            HTML tried to provide structure but was so under prepared, so now we ended up with 100+ JS date picker implementations, 100+ JS menu implementations etc. It might have been m

            • Dart did not really fail.
              It is under active development and a superb language.
              Like a simplified or streamlined Swift.

              • Yeah I should have been more specific.

                Dart didn't fail as a language.
                It failed as being a first class JavaScript replacement. The plan was Chrome would have a Dart interpreter and while other browsers got their Dart interpreter into place it would compile down to JavaScript.

                There was just too much inertia to get that done though.

                • Well, you still can write "simple apps" that compile for smart phones or web pages. Even with camera access etc. on laptops etc. in a "write once run everywhere" Dart style.

          • 2. You'd need to persuade/cajole/bribe/blackmail the SpiderMonkey, V8 and WebKit teaks to support this new language, perhaps as a drop-in replacement for JavaScript support, since you wouldn't need a distinct JS engine. This is likely to be a near-impossible task, but without it, you can't get rid of JS.
            There are already plenty of real languages, like TypeScript, and CoffeeScript, that do that already, and some more toy languages like Amber (a Smalltalk clone on the JavaScript VM), and even Groovy (GScript)

      • What large company uses Javascript seriously on the backend? I've seen some startups do it, but none that succeeded.

    • _xeno_ observed:

      Oracle shot themselves in the foot because LARRY ELLISON just couldn't help himself from being - well - LARRY ELLISON.

      You're welcome ...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Stonent1 ( 594886 )
      It also didn't help that all the modern browsers dropped support for it, and the constant annoyance of it nagging you that whatever version of Java you have installed is never the "right" one. But charging for it is really the main thing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        Agreed, though to be fair, the browsers merely switched APIs to something more secure and Oracle didn't. Oracle has also never really scrutinized Java for security issues, which deterred some, and was very slow about improving performance. Java really still needs to run a lot faster. I'd love to see SILK++-style extensions in Java, where fundamentally parallel code could be run as such without threads or processes.

  • No replacement in sight yet... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @02:08AM (#62515820) Homepage

    Oracle's clumsy attempts to profit from owning Java have put a lot of people off. More, Java is now an "old" language, meaning (a) it has accumulated a lot of cruft, and (b) the cool kids want to use something trendier.

    However. I try to keep track of emerging languages, and I have yet to see "the next big thing". Python isn't it, despite being trendy. Various attempts to "fix" JavaScript also aren't it, for much the same reasons. There are a couple of newer functional languages, but higher order functional programming exceeds the competence of too many programmers. Rust? Not seeing it.

    I think the Java replacement has not yet been invented...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kremmy ( 793693 )
      C# took a lot of the wind out of Java's sails. Being able to run many executables unmodified with Mono or Windows made it the standard Java always wanted to be.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by danskal ( 878841 )

        > C# took a lot of the wind out of Java's sails.

        I would disagree quite strongly with that.

        C# has a few pockets where it is popular, but mostly because management feel "safer" with a Microsoft product. There are a couple of language features where C# learned from Java, but I don't know of anyone running Java who would even consider switching to C# for a second.

        Google, Salesforce etc. are all built with Java. The big player I know of that uses MS tech is StackOverflow. Even Facebook uses some Java (to w

        • Re:No replacement in sight yet... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by tijgertje ( 4289605 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @07:07AM (#62516134)
          If MS did pull their head out of their ass when they introduced C# and .net they had a pretty good chance of "killing off" Java and take the crown. Back then the development on Java was about dead.

          But MS was MS back then and made the language mostly Windows-only with the only good editor for it Windows-only.
          So everyone that wanted cross-platform support did not look twice and ignored it.

          • Minor correction: .Net & C# had an eye for cross platform support from the beginning (for example https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]) which is why it's doing so well on Linux today with almost no changes. But point taken, .Net Framework has been Windows centric until .Net Core came out.

            • That the .NET framework was so Windows-centric back then was for me the reason to completely ignore it after graduating (dam, I'm getting old)
              Nowadays? Well my C#, C++ and Java is rusty, but if a client is prepared to pay for the time to dust it off why not.
              One hard requirement of my side: cross-platform support.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by avandesande ( 143899 )
          Do tell... what language features did C# learn from Java apart by being designed by the same person? C# has consistently added modern language features long before they reach Java.

        • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:25AM (#62516558)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • C# and .Net is a niche eco system.

        The world is running on Java. Wake up from your hybris dreams.

    • Re:No replacement in sight yet... (Score:5, Informative)

      by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @03:25AM (#62515902) Homepage

      There are plenty replacements for Oracle's Java distribution.

      * https://adoptium.net/ [adoptium.net]
      * https://aws.amazon.com/corrett... [amazon.com]
      * https://www.microsoft.com/open... [microsoft.com]
      * https://www.azul.com/downloads [azul.com]
      * whatever ships with your Linux distro
      * ...

      • Almost all Linux distros ship packaged OpenJDK. Azul has been a competent and responsive support provider for their particular flavor of OpenJDK.

      • What's old is new. I remember the IBM JDK being much superior to the Sun version back in the early 2000s.

    • Lawyer heavy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @04:06AM (#62515946) Journal

      A reputation for being sue-happy eventually catches up to you. Karma. Fuck You Oracle!

    • Stop laughing.

      JavaScript won. True thing.
      Unbelievable only if you're not aware that everyone has one or two runtimes of JS on them when you walk around.
      Meaning it runs on the client by default and it runs on the server quite easily these days.

      In a nutshell JavaScript is today doing the exact precise thing Java was originally developed for(!!!).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        Well, no, that wasn't what Java was originally intended for. Java (a development from the Sun Oak programming language) was originally developed to run on any machinery. When Java Applets came around, with the Alpha and Beta releases of Java, this was extended to run on ANY platform. It was compiled to bytecode because that's much more compact (and much faster to run) than interpreted code.

        JavaScript won't run anywhere (which is one reason web testers have to test on many platforms), it isn't well-suited to

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well, different classes of language are optimal for solving different classes of problem. The closest analogues to Java are C# and Go, and I'd argue both those languages are better than Java in many important ways. You mention Python, Javascript, and Rust, but they all really they have different use cases to Java for the most part. It's not unusual for an organisation to use Python and Rust alongside Java, C#, or Go for their respective use cases. It's not unusual to see say, Java/C#/Go used for application

      • But it's not just the language design and technical aspects, even in terms of licensing Java is a poor offering. C# is

        No LOL. Only a C# fanboy could say that. C# is basically licensed the same way Java is, except Microsoft still controls it, whereas Oracle no longer controls Java.

        • You can go to the repositories for C# and .NET on Github and see that everything is MIT licensed. You don't need to take the word of any "fanboy".

          Microsoft has provided written assurances that protect the community from patent claims. While not everyone is convinced these promises offer complete legal protection, thus far Microsoft has abided by their promises regarding their patents. Contrast that with Oracle who already used Java patents to sue competitors.

          While MS does drive developers to their proprieta

          • Microsoft has provided written assurances that protect the community from patent claims. While not everyone is convinced these promises offer complete legal protection

            With good reason. In fact, only fanboys believe them. Evidence is that you are a fanboy.

            Not just that evidence. You are parotting the Microsoft party line from beginning to end. If you had ever used Mono, that experience would be interesting to hear, but all you've done is repeat what Microsoft told you. THAT is why you are a fanboy, because you aren't speaking from your own experience.

            • So is the MIT license somehow bad? Is it preferrable to use Java where Oracle is activelly suing over it, or to use the product that has been around for decades and never led to a similar lawsuit? I wouldn't blindly trust either company, but from a risk management perspective the evidence points to one being far safer to deal with on that front.

              I'm no Microsoft fanboy. For a lot of people who work in the .NET space, they can be the most frustrating part of the ecosystem. They seem to have trouble picking a

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dadoo ( 899435 )

            If MS ever got too out of line, MIT licensing allows for a fork.

            Do you seriously think that fork would last for more than a day, after Microsoft came out with "a new C#-compatible language", designed to be the official Windows programming language? Come on. I have to agree with the parent: you're a fanboi.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

        While I agree with most of what you wrote, Java has one thing done better than C# and Go is enums. In Java they are real first class citizens, can implements interfaces, can have methods, fields, etc... This comes in handy pretty often and is more in line with the OO nature of Java.

        I agree it's a detail, but it's something Java got right (if late in the game) while all other languages just decorated integers with very low added value.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by juancn ( 596002 )
      It's not the language, it's the JVM and all the ecosystem around it that makes it successful. The JVM is a fantastic piece of software. It's extremely easy to build large software for it, you have many libraries, management tools, and so on.

      You can change the language, but getting somewhere close to the JVM and all its goodies is going to be a long road for any challengers.

  • Only our legacy applications use Java.

    Java doesn't even get considered for a new project, and I expect this is quite common now. Of course there will be some places that are heavily invested in java applications with large Java dev teams that are probably continuing to pursue new Java projects, but I think they are the exception not the rule.

    • What do you use instead? As a Java dev I'm honestly curious as to what the alternatives are.

      • Probably Javascript (with React) and node.js on the back-end running on aws with a nosql db like mongo. ... since everything these days is (unfortunately) in the "cloud".

        Extremely inefficient languages and tech stack, but with super-computing power and unlimited memory, who cares, right?

        And as for "old-school" desktop apps, then either C# or C++ or Swift.

  • No shit (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @05:20AM (#62516012)
    Oracle shot themselves in the foot by changing their licensing. It scared & confused companies who were using Java. They either stayed put with the JRE / JVM they were on or jumped over to Coretto or similar dists which were functionally identical to the Oracle binaries but without the restrictions or financial liabilities.

  • Java is Mostly For Back-end Enteprise (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eadon-com ( 630323 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @06:50AM (#62516092) Homepage
    For engines that run Corporate IT, Java is simply the most open, and it's a decent language. Furthermore, Java has the best industry-strenght frameworks (open source again). You cannot beat Java for Enteprise back-end. And it is the perfect partner for Linux servers. People compare Java, in terms of popularity, to C or Python or Javascript, but those comparisons are almost meaningless, as those languages are used in their own domains. (Hardware / Scripting / Browser, and so on.)

    • Java is the new Cobol. It may not be the best example in its particular paradigm, newer languages doubtless will do things better, but all in all, its penetration in the enterprise world means it will be around for decades. That Joe Programmer loves Python or Rust is kind of irrelevant, as you say, because within the domain in which Java exists, it really has no significant competition.

      • Cobol was awful, absolutely dreadful, a joke. That's the reason Cobol died. Java has some quirks, but, in general, it has a virtuous syntax. Python is, as I said, a scripting language, so not a Java competitor. Instead, Python could be said to be a competitor to Groovy, a powerful, Java-like, JVM scripting language. Rust is a bit closer to being a competitor, but, again, it has no chance in the Enterprise back-end. At least not for decades anyway. Instead, Rust is a replacement for C / C++. So, as you also

        • Re:Java is Mostly For Back-end Enteprise (Score:5, Interesting)

          by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:05AM (#62516516) Journal

          The whole point of Java in the enterprise is that by and large it is hardware agnostic. Yes, the CLR can be ported, but the number of systems that have the JVM as opposed to the CLR virtual machine isn't even a contest. When enterprise invests in a Java infrastructure project, it knows damned well that it's going to be able to run for years, if not decades. In that respect, it's not that different than Cobol running on IBM System/370 systems; perpetual supported compatibility.

          • That is, indeed, a huge selling point. In addition, though Cobol is a braindamaged language, and that helped it to its demise, no doubt. And C / C++ are just too dangerous and clunky for Enterprise back-end systems. (Raw pointers, etc).

          • What major platform is the CLR missing on? There are implementations for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and Tizen. They support x86/x64/arm32/arm64 architectures. Amazon offers official support for their cloud, and obviously Azure and .NET are well integrated.

            That might make Solaris/SPARC the largest platform that they're missing. Aside from that, Java really only has an advantage in legacy spaces like Symbian, or in niche areas like scripting on Blu-Ray players.

            In my view, Java has a bit of an edge in

        • C# and .NET is MIT and fully cross platform, and has surpassed Java in far too many ways to be considered just a poor copy. Nowadays you're more likely to see complaints that they've added too much to the C# language rather than concerns about anything being missing.

          I don't blame anyone for being surprised that something that originated at MS became one of the most portable langauges out there. I certainly wouldn't have seen that coming when .NET started out. However, that is what ultimately happened.

          You're

          • C# has added features that make the language ambiguous. What I am getting at is, C# features, stolen from C++, such as operator overloading... Well, in C# this means a line of code that adds two numbers (or whatever) might not be doing what it seems. This is dangerous for mission critical stuff, like enterprise computing. How can you validate the code when it's really difficult to know what that code is doing? I see no advantage of using C# on, say, Linux, or Mac. Why would you use a poor-man's bodged copy

            • Since when was MIT a scary license? Virtually everything in the .NET ecosystem is MIT licensed nowadays. Using a standard and permissive license is better than creating a new one like Oracle has done (and like MS used to do all the time).

              C# has operator overloading, but I've yet to see code use it in a confusing way. Most projects don't use it at all. It is a non-issue in practice.

              It isn't 1999 anymore. Microsoft as a company have changed substantially when it comes to open source. That said, they still mak

              • Regarding the lience, well, the thing is, some of the software is MIT, but other software that is related is not. There are traps. Are you, by any chance, a Microsoft employee, or paid to shill for them? You sound like a marketing guy to me.

    • back-end enterprise, and ~70% of the world's mobile phones. I'd have to guess Android devices/apps represent a massive portion of Java use

      • Indeed. Android, at heart, is Linux and Java. Excellent point, sir! Due to Oracle's "Java" copyright claims, Google used a fork of the Java language, Kotlin, I believe.

        • Kotlin is not Java. It's a completely separate language, though designed to interoperate with the JVM and JCL.

          Also, I'm pretty sure Android never used the Oracle JDK. I believe they first used a fork of Apache Harmony, were sued by Oracle (imagine that?), switched to OpenJDK, then eventually to Kotlin.

          That Oracle would sue over a cleanroom re-implementation of Java, and claim that APIs could somehow be copyrighted, is a lot of the reason I will not touch anything they have ever owned if I can help it.

          • Kotlin is Java with bells and whistles added. So, yes, Kotlin has its own compliler, but it's closely related. (I know all this, but I was taking a liberty with pedantics for brevity.) Kotlin is a Java-like language that is compatible with Java, works with Java libraries, and runs on the same JVM. But Kotlin is closed, and I don't trust the corporation that owns it. Oracle acts in bad faith, but it could only really attack with copyright claims: claims over API copyrights, and they rightly lost that insane

            • I believe Kotlin is open source. In this day and age, few people are going to adopt a new language that isn't.

              While Java also is open source, it is nonetheless owned by an extortion racket with a very long history of litigation against even its own paying customers. I have zero confidence that they will not pursue OpenJDK users if they ever decide it might help them.

  • People do not want anything to do with one of the most evil companies in tech? I am shocked.

  • Oracle seems to be hell-bent on making access to their Java offering as cumbersome and inconvenient as possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      That seems to be their standard mode of operation, which is frankly irritating, given how much Open Source tech they own.

  • Well deserved

  • It's almost like... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @09:32AM (#62516404) Journal

    It's almost like doing business with Oracle should be avoided at all costs, due to their parasitic practices and aggressive license audits that end up costing you more time and money then you would ever save from the up-front discount sweetheart deals they use to get in the door.

    My wife's company is currently evaluating HRIS solutions, with Oracle being one of the finalists. Everyone wants to go with Oracle's competition regardless of the endless streams of Oracle-branded swag; but because the CEO is buddies with an EVP at Oracle guess which way they'll probably end up going, even though it's worse for the company...

    • > It's almost like doing business with Oracle should be avoided at all costs

      Sometimes you can keep a pet tiger without getting mauled. It's never a good bet.

      OpenJDK is fine. n.b. when OracleJava hits 3% they'll start suing OpenJDK users. No legal theory necessary to get a settlement.

      • That's part of why no OpenJDK for me.

        Oracle is not so much a software company, as an extortion racket pretending to be a software company. That was true of a number of other tech companies in the past, but most of them have improved their behavior, while Oracle has not.

  • Processing is a graphics-centered programming language. Unfortunately, it is fueled by Java. There is no one-stop package like Processing to be added to Python or Julia that is anywhere as near feature-rich for cross-platform graphics.
  • That's what happens when you burn karma like cord-wood.

  • I Would Like to See Basic09 Modenized (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:39AM (#62516592) Homepage
    Basic09 is an old programming language merging Basic, Pascal, and C. It was strongly typed. Basic09 packed ( somewhat compiled) to "intermediate" code that used an executable run-time. If something like Basc09 was modernized, it would likely be faster than Python, perhaps Java as well. The code would be as transportable as Java. I think that unlike most Basic-class languages, Basic09 was structured enough to be a teaching language.

    Under OS9, the runtime, Basic09 allowed the writer to swap packed modules in an out of the system at will, as long as there was enough system RAM. I had written a PhotoShop-like drawing program in it; only the disk space could limit the number of tools.

    Graphics under Basic09 where handled with either of two graphics modules, providing usual set of 2D graphics functions. Basic09 even had a module for dealing with very low-level system calls to the OS, called Syscall, that was actually capable of setting up processor registers for the ins and outs of their system calls.

    For it to be modernized, it would need double-precision variables, and a better error handling system. Switch-case statements would be good too, and make them work better than they do in C,.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    https://nitros9.sourceforge.io... [sourceforge.io]

    • JavaScript is BASIC of the new millennium. it is ubiquitous. JavaScript even has the same shitty design as BASIC -- typos in variables aren't caught; unless you used the "use strict"; hack.

  • Only I use Java 2. I learnt it from perhaps the greatest Java book out there: Just Java 2 by Peter van der Linden. I've had lots of fun with Java. If it ever gets discontinued, you better believe Imma be pissed at Oracle. Who's with me when I say Java is one of the greatest languages?

  • History lesson? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by twdorris ( 29395 ) on Monday May 09, 2022 @11:18AM (#62516698)

    This should surprise no one.

    Y'all know why Larry / Oracle really bought Sun, right? It had *zero* to do with the promising aspects of Sun / Solaris marketing prospects and *zero* to do with wanting to see the Java ecosystem thrive and prosper.

    It had everything to do with Larry wanting to avenge and carry out his good friend Steve Job's dying wish of making Google pay dearly in a thermonuclear fashion for daring to offer a competitive alternative to the amazing iPhone. The only leverage anyone had for doing that was the flimsy chance of suing Google for copyright infringement on their underlying Java-like "technology".

    The fact that this tactic had the chance of seriously crippling entire industries and livelihoods on a truly global scale mattered not. If only they could make Google stop producing Android or, if not that, force Google to pay royalties until they went under, than all would be well and Jobs could finally, at long last, have his restful peace.

    Stewardship of Java? That was just an annoying side effect thrust upon them and they've tried every since to figure out how to kill it off without it being a blatantly obvious desire of theirs from the beginning. It's taken years and years, but they're getting closer and closer.

    F'k Oracle and f'k Larry!

  • Installing Java runtime, keeping it up to date or worse breaking your oracle program by updating your Java runtime. It’s such a headache to maintain on desktops at every business I’ve used it.
  • Who would ever think that buying a useful, fun technology, spiking the pricing and being draconian assholes about its use, and then never properly patching or updating the security would cause users to shy away from said technology?

    SHOCK!

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