What started as a "this should be just a few namespace changes" might have cost thousands of person days in my current job. So many tests red, the whole CI/CD broken, and when all "fixed" and done, there were still some uncaught production bugs haunting us for many months... Simply horrible.
On paper, it really was just a few changes. In practice, it forced a massive transitive dependency and technical debt cleanup for many companies.
Java 4 to 5 was very rough. Sun kept trying to defer major changes, sort of how Elixir claims it is mostly done. But something changed in 5 and the floodgates opened. They made too many changes at once, and so out in the field you would bump into projects stuck on Java 4 even as 6 was in beta. And then 7, and a few past that.
Honest question. Is java whatever version today worth learning again?
Java is something I shoved of my life together with the MS stuff and never looked back, but there is still plenty of market for it anyway
I don't remember anything significantly bumpy for about 30 large-ish applications we migrated from 8 to 11, guess the mileage varied. JDK is serious stable stuff.
Deprecations, which also affects libraries, i.e. the dusty one you were chugging along on top of might need to be replaced or adopted because the original maintainer gave up years ago.
patates|4 months ago
On paper, it really was just a few changes. In practice, it forced a massive transitive dependency and technical debt cleanup for many companies.
hinkley|4 months ago
motbus3|4 months ago
pandemic_region|4 months ago
ffsm8|4 months ago
cess11|4 months ago
pjmlp|4 months ago
Also breaking changes do happen, see list of removed methods
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/migrate/removed-ap...