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by Fradow
3885 days ago
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Well, we can't know the future, but I'd like to draw a parallel. A few years ago, Java offered the promise "write once, run anywhere". It worked pretty well until a major OS decided "nah, not gonna happen here". What's different this time? It is popular (Java was and still is), it is backed by a big company (Java too), it only needs Javascript, which all devices have (Java only needs a JVM, which all devices used to have). Well, I sure hope for all the folks involved it really is the future. At least, it may well be for the next few years. |
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No, it really didn't. For a time after "Java Web Start" was introduced in 2001, java had (has) a pretty decent story for distributing application (big run time dependency, problematic java updater non withstanding).
But I think the biggest problem java had/has is the mix of java being a hopelessly verbose, and arguably rather primitive language that's a bad fit for both AWT and (to a lesser degree) Swing. It's almost comical to contrast "hello world" with swing/java and with swing/jython (or jruby) - it's not that the UI toolkit is unusable, but it's not a good fit for the biggest use-case: simple business applications.
I should add that I think kotlin looks like a pretty perfect match for "the good parts of java without any added complexity".
> What's different this time?
Modern JS is arguably a better fit for simple GUI programming than modern java is.