Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

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Spot on.

People do not realize that in some countries virtually all the citizen are carrying a Java SmartCard on them at all time (either an ID card or a medical security card). People do not realize that there are billions of devices running Java (like TV decoders) and that Java is even officially part of some specs (e.g. you cannot have a Blu-Ray player without having Java). In addition to basically power the entire banking infrastructure (it's damn near close to impossible to make an electronic payment without having Java involved in the process) and pretty much the entire corporate world, Java also powers a gigantic number of high-target websites (like eBay and FedEx).

And even in browsers, without needing applets, Java is also used to generate JavaScript (GWT and ClojureScript being to examples -- at this point ClojureScript still needs the JVM to compile to JavaScript).

And Android, of course.

Java is going to dwarf COBOL's legacy. Big times.

The real sadness here is that the writing was on the wall: any knowledgeable Java programmer knew, 15 years ago, that Java applets were an insecure piece of excremental technology.

You don't know how many time I've vomited on Java applet in Usenet's comp.lang.java.programmer years ago, saying how big of a mistake and loss of energy it was... Only to have the likes of Jon Skeet and Roedy Green defending Java applets tooth and nail.

Why do corporations spend resources in mounting the JRE to their devices? Wouldn't it be much simpler to use the instruction set of the hardware and write stuff in C / Assembly?

I am asking because my first language was Java and after learning C / gnu AS it feels much more comfortable to actually have control over the resources you are using than relying on the magic the JRE does for you.

“it feels much more comfortable to actually have control over the resources you are using than relying on the magic the JRE does for you.”

That's exactly the problem Java/JRE was trying to solve. People make mistakes. Given the large quantities of programers corporations hire, it is almost certain that mistakes, especially those dealing with hardware resources (e.g. memory), will happen. Java/JRE reduces a large part of them (e.g. memory allocation/deallocation due to GC) so corporations can hire average programers to do the majority of tedious tasks without blowing things (too much) off. You cannot have such guarantee with C/C++.

In addition to the points made by riobard and kd0amg, using the JRE ensures that their engineers can write code that is as general purpose as possible. They won't have to rewrite large parts of the software if they want to deploy it to a different architecture/platform, for example.

Leave the low level stuff to the JRE folks and spend your resources on doing stuff that directly makes you money or furthers your cause.

With C, you don't just get to manage memory yourself -- you have to, which can become a distraction from the actual program logic.

Thanks for explaining. The reasons sound quite obvious and I feel a little silly for asking in the first place.

"TV decoders" written in Java?

edit: thanks for the info, repliers.

All of Time Warner's Digital Cable boxes, for example.

Is that why there's 2-3 second lag responding to button presses and biweekly crashed?

There are many embedded devices running Java that are quick and efficient, so whatever slowness those cable boxes have is not due to the technology used. It's probably due to the same organisational problems that cause all slow and bloated software.

In the case of cable or satellite TV decoders there's usually more focus from management on adding features fast than on making the software bulletproof.

No, programmers can be rushed by management or plain incompetent in any language.

DirecTV has similar lags at times. I would love for them to open source the UI and allow hackers to fix and impove it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Home_Platform#DVB-J

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