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bberrry | 5 months ago

Those of you surprised to see Java so prominent, where have you been all your careers? 10 people startups with nodejs backends? You must have been entirely shielded from enterprise software companies.

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bjackman|5 months ago

It's a weird one - I've been at Google for more than 5 years. I know from the stats that we have a zillion lines of actively developed Java, there must be huge swathes of the company that you could even call a "Java shop". I dig into random bits of code all the time. And yet I've looked at Java maybe three times in my tenure. And if I needed to submit Java code, I would not have a single contact to ping for readability review.

Java was the first language I learned in my CS degree, I still think this was a sensible choice by the CS department, but I don't think I've written a single piece of Java since I left 10 years ago!

It seems like a lot of Java usecases may be big and important but kinda isolated! Something about where they sit in the economic value chain perhaps?

yeasku|5 months ago

Most people work for companies that use tech, not that create tech.

There the world is not like at Google. Sap, Java and .net are what people work with.

yolo3000|5 months ago

So what are the main languages there? Go? Python?

munksbeer|5 months ago

What products do you work on and what language?

8fingerlouie|5 months ago

Java is the new COBOL.

The financial sector, insurance sector, healthcare sector all jumped on Java a couple of decades ago, and they have massive repositories of Java code, and are actively migrating their COBOL code to Java.

spicybbq|5 months ago

> Java is the new COBOL.

What do you mean by this? To me it sounds like people are saying they are both "old" languages, but I don't know what you mean.

I work in a shop that has lots of both Java and COBOL. We are not "actively migrating" COBOL code to Java. It looks like mainframes will continue to exist for decades to come (i.e. >20 more years). Obviously, brand new applications here are not written in COBOL.

osullivj|5 months ago

I've said this myself as Java's reification of mid 90s OO and poor interop via JNI are not to my taste. But I've spent 25yrs in banking with JPMC, BoA, Barclays et al. Done lots of interop with Cobol on S/390, AS/400 and VME. Never heard of any of those systems being rewritten in Java. Have encountered key mainframe prod systems for which source is lost.

cess11|5 months ago

I might be mistaken but as I understand it COBOL never had the reach that Java does. It's everywhere, from embedded systems to massive clusters, as bulky VM, slimmed down VM or native. Business, science, recreation, the sector almost doesn't matter, it's going to have Java somewhere in there.

FrustratedMonky|5 months ago

Yeah, isn't SAP built with Java? Stodgy old big bloated. The new COBOL. Oracle/Java/SAP. Some kind of trinity of evil.

noisy_boy|5 months ago

Anyone who is surprised is not from Finance sector. I wouldn't just say enterprise though because there could be non-finance enterprises where Microsoft and .NET/C# rule.

indigodaddy|5 months ago

Also in telecom and largeISP, Java is everywhere.