why did they let you adopt Java 8?

# random

[codeslubber]

why did they let you adopt Java 8?

[oranj]

codeslubber: moving this to a thread 😄

[oranj]

The shift from java 7 to java 8 is much much smaller then from java (any version) to Kotlin. Plus you can just hire "Java developers" without asking for which version they use.

[oranj]

And getting them to approve Java 8 is generally easy because Java 7 is EOL

[oranj]

and Java 8 is just Java 7 with some cute things added

[codeslubber]

I understand that.. I think the problem in that argument in general was you first said these 3rd parties would do _ and then when I said ‘they must not be doing reviews or care about nullity’ you took that personally

[codeslubber]

well 8 is a pretty big change if you really use it though

[codeslubber]

streams and lambdas will quickly result in code

[codeslubber]

that a no 8 developer will have a hard time maintaining

[codeslubber]

I do disagree with @orangy ‘s assertion, when you can find articles like the trillion dollar mistake about nullity,

[codeslubber]

you can get a lay person to understand the value of languages like Swift and Kotlin…

[oranj]

A lay person - yes. But you have to understand that these decision usually go through a board of conservative business-minded people. For whom using Kotlin sounds like introducing complexity and a new cost-factor.

[oranj]

Kotlin would really need to be mainstream or to provide "revolutionary" features to become viable for enterprise

[oranj]

For example - in my current place we are maintaining 10 or so projects. The biggest headaches are the ones not in our primary language - we have a service in Go and a portal in PHP. Business outside the dev team realises that. So if we went with a proposal of starting the next project in Kotlin, they would be like "oh nonono, you remember what happened to that last Go thing you guys made?" Even though the Go thing was made by a contractor who is not here anymore.

[codeslubber]

I have been through that. Whenever I want to remind myself of the vision of computing dominated by enterprise types, I rerun ‘Developers, Developers, Developers,’ thank god those days are gone. Seriously, one of Jobs’ greatest legacies was inadvertently dynamiting that vision of computing as suit serfdom. Those same people said they would never put their data on the cloud, nor carry a phone that was a computer, blah, blah, blah.. The commonality there is people attempting to generalize about things that they a. don’t understand, and b. that they have no data on. Go to someone in finance and say to them ‘AT&T just went down a point yesterday, so clearly we should exit all telecom stocks,’ and they will have one thought: ‘know nothing.’ No offense but I don’t care about Kotlin conquering the enterprise. That’s a fighting-the-last-war goal. I want it to represent the state of the art in languages, and their use within tools. It’s a golden age now. I like Swift, Kotlin and to lesser extents see the value in Typescript and Scala. A suit worrying about access to fresh serfs is just not a pressing concern. Enterprise can just wait until Java copies all of Kotlin’s ideas. To steal a Woody Allen joke, let’s see, today’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday… should be around 10 years…

[codeslubber]

Maybe you could talk them into letting you rewrite the service thing with Kotlin and Ktor? Also, note: the argument that it will be clumped with other foreign bodies that brought pain really does not apply. Distance between Java and Kotlin is tiny compared to Java and Go.