Comment by bentcorner
3 days ago
Reminds me of the School -> Pro pipeline where companies sell cheaply or even give away their software to learning institutions so that students who go pro are familiar with their tools and then later recommend it for their work.
That’s absolutely true for things like MS Office and Adobe - but it also works in the other direction: I’m sure making kids use Java for AP computer-science or for undergrad contributed to its uncool status today.
The two almost-contradictory takes I hold about this are…
- Java is cool, actually
- Java would be just as uncool even if people weren’t required to use it in school
The problem for Java's "uncool status" isn't Java as a programming language, the JVM or its academic use IMHO, it rather is a consequence of large-enterprise culture.
Large enterprise doesn't value "creativity" or any deviation from standards, but it does value plans and estimates - hence clueless, brainless "managers" and "architects" forced programmers to do absolutely insane bullshit busywork that a gang of monkeys on LSD could do, and that culture spread throughout the large-enterprise world.
On top of that come "design by committee" stuff like CORBA, XML, SOAP, Java EE, Enterprise Beans and everything associated with this particular horror show, JDBC...
You can do absolutely mind blowing stuff with Java and the JVM. But fuck corporate for torturing Java and the poor sods tasked with the busywork. Java got the image it has because programmers want to be creative but could not be so because their bosses were braindead.
The historical Java patterns of factories of gizmos modified by adapters on adapters etc. really makes the large codebases miserable to work on. Along its enterprise lifespan it picked up all the fad modelling/project jargon/pattern nonsense (which as you rightly say were there to limit creativity) and that is now embedded in codebases. It might be that a new Java enterprise application started from scratch would be lovely, but those are rarely seen in the actual enterprise world.
I don't think it was ever uncool because of the core language, it was always uncool because of the standard libraries, UIs and culture.
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Autocad 10-12 back in college. Cost thousands of dollars in 80s/90s dollars, Not officially allowed to copy, but in reality effortless to copy and run at home for free.
There were other products aiming to be just as good at the same time that were actually protected with dongles and such.
The one that everyone could run at home is the one that took over the world.
Same with Photoshop, and Windows, and plenty of others. Intentional or not, the ease of copying these products is what made them ubiquitous.
I think Windows was ubiquitous because for a long time there was nothing else usable for Joe Average on PCs, and PCs were essentially the only game in town until Apple got its act together.