[jvanderbot]

Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.

The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

[mooreds]

My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".

There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.

The world is big :) .

0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

[jvanderbot]

You're right of course, but we only just met! You're the first of probably many counter examples.

[rbanffy]

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.

Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.

[InsideOutSanta]

Yeah, lots of corporate backend code is Java, and Java is a great choice for backend/server code. I've never seen Oracle anywhere, though, not in banks and not in governments. I've mostly seen Postgres and MSSQL and some MongoDB.

[JackFr]

I've been working in Wall St. banks for the past 30 years, and I've never used an Oracle database. The investment banks were all Sybase shops in the 90's, and a bunch of them still are. In my experience those that do move are most likely to go to SQL Server, since its Sybase roots make the transition a little easier.

When something has been there for 20+ years switching costs are big.

[cyberpunk]

I work for a pretty big one and we’ve got an exacc or twelve.

Regulatory thing for us, some workloads need production support for the data tier for various boring legal and compliance reasons, so our choices are kida limited to oracle and, these days, mongo, who have made massive inroads to enterprise in the last couple years.

Personally, I prefer Mongo.

[pjc50]

We use Java.

We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.

[tombert]

Apple used Java in a ton of backend stuff. At least the entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java and very very small amount of Clojure.

[steve1977]

There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next to Objective-C.

Some NeXT products like WebObjects got ported to Java (and ran not only the iTunes backend but also things like the original Dell online store) and there was something called the Java bridge which allowed you to program Cocoa applications with Java.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Oh, and with Yellow Box for Windows, this was also possible on Windows.

If you look at the screenshots here, it's mostly Windows 2000: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...

[giobox]

It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a not insignificant number of folks in business/academia who thought Java would take over the world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET.

Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.

[steve1977]

There was even a Microsoft Visual J++ (and later J#).

It was definitely the thing for a while. Although I remember my very first steps with Java and Swing and my primary impression was "this is so slow".

[jug]

Yup, this brings back my academia years in 1998, sitting with KDE 1.0 and Java 1.1. It was mostly Java, then Perl as this fabulous scripting/glue language, teeny bit of C and MIPS Assembler for the low level courses.

We didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about to change everything.

[bombcar]

Java really could have taken over the world, and it can be performant, too.

One of the versions of the most popular game in the world is written in Java, and it's quite capable of being very fast.

[steve1977]

Well this must have been around Java 1.2 or 1.4 IIRC, I'm not even sure if Hotspot was a a thing back then.

I just remember that GUI programming with Swing felt like molasses compared to native GUIs at that time (i.e. Win32/MFC, Cocoa, Motif).

But of course the cross-platform aspect was cool and since I did quite a bit with Solaris back then, Java got of course pushed a lot by Sun.

[CyberDildonics]

Are you talking about minecraft? Minecraft was known for working only because it is so simple graphically compared to other games. It was said to allocate and deallocate hundreds of megabyte of memory every frame.

[bombcar]

Minecraft still runs, and it may look graphically simple but it's actually pretty complex (as it has millions of blocks in memory at any time and has to cull which to not render, etc).

Minecraft does do some horrible things to the JVM, but it's strong and can take it.

[jen20]

One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.

[butterlesstoast]

Checks out https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=java&sort=relevan...

[shrikant]

Yeah I can see that, even when a recruiter contacted me a few years back for a data engineering position, they were looking strictly for experience in JVM-based languages.

[rbanffy]

> Clojure

Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.

[tombert]

Yeah, I wish they did more Clojure as well. As far as I could tell, it was kind of snuck in about ~12 years ago, and it kind of grew from there.

To be fair, I know people hate on it, but I honestly do kind of think Objective C is kind of a cool language. I think it's ugly but I think the message-passing style semantics are kind of neat.

[jimbokun]

Adding Smalltalk message passing as an extension to C was very clever and allowed writing very efficient code and dynamic high level UI code in a single language. The semantics were kept clear by the distinctive syntax of message passing. And allowed access to any existing C libraries.

[duskwuff]

Objective C is neat inasmuch as it managed to add a simple but practical object system to C without all the added baggage of C++. It wasn't without its downsides - in particular, the overhead of a method call was significantly higher than in C++ - but I still appreciate it for its minimalism.

[Wowfunhappy]

Back in the day, Objective-C was considered a cool hip language, wasn't it?

[adolph]

> entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java

Wasn't that because iTunes started out as a NextStep WebObjects application? WebObjects started on Objective C, transitioned to a framework for Java in early 2000's, came to Apple with the Next acquisition.

[somewhereoutth]

iCloud is mostly Java (or was, about 10 years ago when I was there)

[glitchc]

The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.

[iamjake648]

Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.

Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

[geodel]

It could mean you know very few developers.

> Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

It means nothing. ~90% of core development of JDK and JVM is done by Oracle employees and it is shared by all distributions by various vendors.

[pjmlp]

So you actually know a lot of Android developers.

[amiga386]

There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.

Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land, with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise is a Microsoft shop or not.

Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user interface with millions of Java-only app developers.

Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a Java-specific thing.

[bobthepanda]

Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.

[wredcoll]

Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java

[tombert]

I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.

I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.

[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.

[mort96]

I'm sure GraalVM is nice enough technology but I don't understand why anyone would actively choose to use a JVM from Oracle if they can avoid it.

[tombert]

The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved, so if you're writing command line tools in particular it can be cool.

[mort96]

Most languages I write are ahead of time compiled with pretty good startup time so it's not really a need I have that I feel GraalVM solves?

[pjmlp]

OpenJDK is from Oracle as well.

[vips7L]

HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time. Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache and crac etc.

[bobthepanda]

Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

[burnte]

> Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top

Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.

[coredog64]

They have their own OpenJDK distribution (Amazon Corretto)

[pjmlp]

They surely like the work Oracle employees provide to OpenJDK.

[nsxwolf]

There are literally millions of us that write Java and don't work for the CIA. It's like still in the top 3 of all languages.

[bombcar]

I was surprised at first to learn Minecraft was a CIA plot and then I thought about it and it all fit together :)

[ghurtado]

> The only developers I know who write Java

It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.

[prepend]

Useful for letting us know that GP has a limited network and situational awareness.

I always find these “relative to me” claims not very informative on the internet. But it fun when every once in a while you notice the claimer is Bill Joy or Linus Torvalds or someone where the relativeness holds weight.

[layer8]

Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, … It’s being used everywhere.

[p2detar]

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

This can’t be a serious comment. I’d say probably half the world‘s B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in Europe.

[malfist]

Amazon is predominantly a java shop as is a lot of big enterprise

[grishka]

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

Huh??? Google, the search engine part, is written in Java as far as I know. Yandex uses Java extensively. Odnoklassniki, once second most popular Russian social network, is written in Java. Banks like Java. Android apps are written in Java (and Kotlin, which I consider an abstraction over Java).

And that's only what I can remember right away. A sizable chunk of the world runs on Java.

[lenerdenator]

The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?

[layer8]

Oracle effectively still largely controls the evolution of the language and of OpenJDK, and Java is still a registered Oracle trademark. While it could be forked and renamed if necessary (as happened in the javax –> jakarta transition), that would likely end up being quite disruptive and costly.

That being said, Oracle’s valuation is based on their huge integrated ecosystem. That they also control Java, while not insignificant, probably only plays a minor role there.

[pjmlp]

Who do you think pays most of the salaries of people working on OpenJDK?

[sleepybrett]

I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).

[losvedir]

What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?

[bjord]

it's not purely gov work—lots of legacy software (especially outside of the US) is java-based

and if you hire an offshore outsourcing company, odds are that they will insist on something java (spring) based, as that's where their experience is

[vips7L]

Lots of green field apps are Java based too. I just started a new codebase in Java 25.

[northern-lights]

as a counterpoint - Amazon is a Java shop and most of the companies that model themselves after Amazon are also Java shops.

[raverbashing]

And you know that they will be using Java 6 just because...

[victorbjorklund]

That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it’s more about your personal network being close to that world)