[oblio]

Java is probably the biggest "eternal" language we have these days. Probably tied with C and C++.

There's <<so much>> Java code churned out that it's unbelievable. Business systems have a ton more code than infrastructure systems.

[badsectoracula]

> Java is probably the biggest "eternal" language we have these days

Is it? I haven't followed it in years but i remember reading about people sticking with Java 8 because later versions broke backwards compatibility in some cases.

[overtomanu]

Its a bit complicated, technically java language never broke backward compatibility. you can run existing java programs fine in higher java jvm's by adding extra command line parameters to include all existing libraries in default module. But it becomes complicated by the use of intermediate tools which are not updated to handle this.

[pjmlp]

Yep, modules were a big break, however all the relevant libraries that actually matter on the Java ecosystem are available on latest versions.

Basically it is the same kind of effect like school/university teachers whose idea of C++ is C with extras, and if they teach something more close to C++98 proper even in 2021, one should consider themselves lucky.

[chii]

> [java] Probably tied with C and C++.

i think java wins over c/c++, because there's very little low level, machine specific code you can do in java, where as you surely can do that in c/c++.

[pjmlp]

True, and instead of rewriting the whole stuff, if some C or C++ is actually required there is always JNI, JNA, or the upcoming Panama.

[wglb]

I would check on cobol first.

[oblio]

There's a ton more Java out there. Java is much newer but it's from a time when we're talking about tens of millions of developers worldwide, instead of tens of thousands. A lot more people have been churning out Java since 1996 than Cobol since 1955 or so.

[wglb]

Do you have a feeling for how many Java LOC are out there?

[oblio]

I've worked for a 10 person company where 5 were working on a Java backend, the app was about 10 years old. 250k lines.

I used to work for a mediocre multinational with about 50 people working on a big Java front end to their many servers. Just the frontend was about 3 million lines.

You've never heard of either of them, the multinational had a market cap of about half a billion.

I've worked for a bunch of bigger companies but I don't have numbers, I just know they had bigger systems.

I wouldn't be shocked if there are tens of billions to hundreds of billions of lines of Java in production right now. I imagine that something like half a billion are added each year.

There are so many big Java middleware companies nobody has heard of. You wouldn't even know they use Java if you wouldn't look at the job listings.

[doetoe]

If you multiply the 5000 LoC each developer at your 10-person company wrote yearly by the tens of millions of Java developers in your previous comment, you get much more than half an (American) billion

[Tanjreeve]

That's going to be quite a loaded metric considering how verbose Java is.

[kaba0]

Java is at most longer than “short program” by a small constant factor, and that is mostly around project initialization.

Also, I have never really understood it — c++ is not the shortest thing either with duplicating headers/implementations, go’s error handling deserves a whole discussion in terms of verbosity yet these languages are not considered repetitive.

[wglb]

Well as a former cobol programmer, I would argue that it is no less verbose than pretty much any language.

[yellowapple]

C# is also probably in a similar league, for the same reasons.