People are using a Java higher than 7? surprised corporate face

One of my university professors wanted us to program using DrJava, so of course Java 8 it is.

Why did he want to use that? Because it was similar DrRacket, which he made us use in the previous term to program Scheme (which is just lisp for teachers). Of course that was just us being all modern and such, he himself used DrScheme, the deprecated precursor of DrRacket.

This guy is so old that my high school Systems teacher had him as her university professor.

He has a fancy current gen MacBook Pro that he uses for his stuff. Then when it's lesson time he whips out a windows 95 netbook and a daisy chain of adapters from VGA to thunderbolt.

That's so new! My stuff still requires version 1.8
/s

we upgraded to 8 from 5 at my first job in 2014

I think many companies don’t actively maintain a large portion of their code base at all. So any amount of work, no matter how small, involves a “project” and “budget” and “approvals” to even assign somebody to the task of upgrading.

Then you have the testing and due diligence from whomever actually uses the thing.

Java 8 to 21 + spring boot 2 to 3 brought the need to change a lot of dependencies, but often they were drop-in replacements. That was mostly Jakarta stuff. On the Spring side, a lot of things we used were deprecated, but that was not related to the Java version.

Did not take a huge amount of time to upgrade anyway. But maybe our systems weren't the most complex in the first place, a lot of our applications were pretty small.

Java for this flash in the pan mobile shit? Sure, they like breaking things.

Java for enterprise? No. They're probably only just finished converting that COBOL system to it, and they started 20 years ago. People have died while making it. They will never change anything.

I think it was 5 that decided to change everything on the parser level, and 11 that decided to change everything on the modules level.

Outside of those, Java has always been extremely backwards compatible. But last time I checked the ecosystem still didn't recover from that module semantics change.

bmy thapler

The company is using old proprietary software that breaks unless a specific java version is used. And don't want to upgrade/switch because it is too expensive.