C# takes a different approach, you target a specific .NET framework rather than "C#". That way it's been able to develop, but backward compatibility is still a thing.

I think at some point Oracle or Sun should have released a "Java 2" which included the lessons learned from the first iteration. No backward compatibility issues because Java 1 would still be a thing, but Java 2 could have fixed the holes and ensured the language had the features that are currently half-assed.

Not really, as far as programming languages, a pirate's first love is the C.

> and programmers want to use Java

Is meant to read

> and if programmers want to use Java

*sigh* Second time today.

WebAssembly means that, no, Javascript is not the only language available for manipulating web pages on the client side any more, it can be anything you want. If Java is ready for that, and programmers want to use Java, there's no reason they shouldn't - it's a safer, more robust, language than Javascript. Of course, they can also use Rust, Go, or a whole host of other languages.

Also, FWIW, applets have been dead for a decade or more now, no mainstream web browser has supported them since 2017. The article is about Oracle removing the obsolete infrastructure from the core Java libraries. The only reason they've sat on their hands about it is that in theory a non-applet might still reference some class intended for applet usage - perhaps because a JAR might be dual mode, or because an applet ported to the desktop might have legacy references.

C# is a better language over all. Java has suffered for a variety of reasons:

- An insistence on backward compatibility, which is why, for example, generics are kinda half-assed, the standard library has lots of gotchas as functionality was grafted on poorly.
- Apparent confusion of "slowly" with "carefully" which means many features are missing decades later, and what finally gets in there seems to be half a solution, as if the Java team wants to see whether it works before finishing it. The "AutoCloseable" try-with-resources thing seems a classic example (as well as hampered by the compatibility obsession)
- Oracle just doesn't seem interested in it as a project to invest resources into improving
- Oracle keeps playing licensing games which is pushing away a sizable amount of the community- especially that part they need to attract, skilled academics and other experts who aren't going to contribute to a proprietary project outside of being hired to work on it.

And... hate to say it, but Microsoft does know what it's doing for the most part.

But if truth be told, while they're not full replacements (JVM and .NET are far more useful than Slashdot's naysayers like to pretend), most of the mindshare lost from Java is going to Rust and Go. Rust solves a specific issue the JVM has, albiet with its own problems and requiring a mindset change from programmers, and Go is more Java-like but loses the bureaucracy overheads and compiles to executables directly.

Should you choose Java for your next project? If you're familiar with Java, and/or more comfortable programming in it than C# take a look at Go. If you need something more cross platform or something more modular, making Java and .NET the only platforms you'd look at, C# is way more advanced than Java ever will be.

Not trying to say Java is bad. It's just fallen behind, and Oracle sucks.

Applets were a problem for a variety of reasons. The JVM at the time was buggy, Netscape was buggy, and the combination of the two could lead to crashes. Additionally several bugs in the JVM were actual security holes giving Java an unfair reputation for poor security (it wasn't Java or Java's design, it was a crap implementation.) And I don't think browser makers ever quite embraced the idea despite believing early on that Java was "the future".

In part, the latter was because of a combination of Microsoft going anti-Java when Sun made it clear they weren't open to forks, and Netscape just realizing it was weird to tie Netscape to a specific programming language and associated environment, especially one that wasn't quite sure what it wanted to be.

Meanwhile your views about Java's UX capabilities were almost certainly based upon the fact applets had only two ways to interact with users - pop-up windows and fixed sized rectangles on web pages. Neither were ideal.

What TFA talks about is arguably the way Java should have gone, with the browser dictating the environment in which apps should run, and the functionality being much more advanced than what was available in a browser in 1998. A lot of where browsers have headed has been the wrong direction - it shouldn't take gigabytes to render pages just because they have some fancy DOM stuff on them - but at least one can argue they're pretty close to feature complete right now. WebAsm with a modern DOM is a hell of an improvement on the rectangles.

> I'm always baffled by the insistence of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages

should be

> I'm always baffled by the insistence by opponents of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages

This has been your reminder that Slashdot's refusal to allow people to edit their own comments just generates more heat than light.

"Our side" hasn't really shot anyone. Kirk's killer appears to either be apolitical or, less likely, a member of a MAGA faction that hated Kirk's faction. There isn't anything linking Kirk's killer to left wing politics at all, if there had been it'd be mentioned pretty much every day by the Trump administration. And both the attempts to murder Trump came from people whose friends said were conservatives.

Your side, OTOH, has killed or attempted to kill a fair number of the right's opponents, be it the murder of elected politicians such as Hortman or Hoffman, or even the crazed hammer attack on Pelosi's husband.

And we're still here. You're not going to win.

So Donald Trump isn't MAGA, he sneaked in? I could have sworn he was the one who popularized the initials.

(Or are you saying a lot of his supporters believed a rather obvious lie? Just curious, but why is this lie so important and not the others?)

Are the people rewriting everything in Rust with us in the room right now?

There are some projects to rewrite some tools in Rust, sometimes unnecessarily, but nobody's proposed rewriting everything or even everything in use. Even this article is about Rust being added to the kernel, not rewritten in it. Where are you getting it from that, say, anyone is proposing rewriting the Linux kernel in Rust?

In fairness, PHP simply replaces one type of lack-of-safety with another. C does not assume null, 0, "", "0", and false or all the same thing, something PHP does because... reasons. If PHP actually implemented mandatory type safety, PHP would be no worse than Python, and the rewritten code running under the new PHP would have most of the security issues fixed.

Rust's spec... do bear in mind there's at least one project out there that's implementing an independent version of Rust. You kind of need multiple implementations for a programming language to have one. If you look at most of the programming languages we deal with every day, relatively few have a formal spec that isn't "Whatever the only implementation of this does". I'm not arguing that's good, far from it, but it's apparently not a barrier.

If I had to criticize Rust these days, I'd say the fact its standard library is bare and you're forced to rely upon third party modules ("crates") that aren't audited or in any way curated for basic functionality is pretty fucking dumb. It completely undermines the entire point of the language, that it's supposed to be safe to use. We know from the XZ backdoor that you can't trust third party code that way, and it's only a matter of time before a malicious actor attacks one of the bigger crates - perhaps via a dependency - and does the same thing.

To me, Rust having a standard library comparable to, say, Java's is more important than it having a written specification.

I'm always baffled by the insistence of Rust, Java, or other modern programming languages that developers can only make a certain number of errors-per-project. That somehow if you write something in C it'll be perfect except for the buffer overflows and null pointers. That if you write it in Java or Rust or Go or whatever somehow those will go so you need to introduce logic errors instead.

Is this how you program?

As for "Developers should now be freed to make higher level, more difficult to find logic erors", are you implying that it's easier to find logic errors in C?

God forbid anyone ban bullying at a time when bullying was becoming increasingly common in tech communities.

I'm not sure how it qualifies as "toxic" to ban toxic behavior, but there we go. In the mean time at least one kernel programmer has been celebrated here for actively lying about the Rust project and demanding the Rust modules be banned from using his code because... no reasons given.

Literally the only reason for objecting to Rust's "real world politics" is if you wanted to call a fellow programmer who you had a disagreement with the N word, F word, or misgender them. None of that behavior has a place in an open source community, or indeed a work place or even a bar.

Thanks for that link. Interesting that he never mentions home security cameras, doorbell cameras, etc, except possibly covered by some of the exceptions. Also interesting that "journalists" have an explicit exception; I wonder how they define "journalist" today, where everyone can be a journalist of some sort.

So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.

Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that this type of content isn't seen as adult-only" and TBH I think the W3C could easily define it, and legislators could then basically decide whether it's worth the hassle of going beyond the W3C's recommendations. (Remember that a world wide standard for what constitutes adult material is going to be an issue anyway, to obey Australia's law as well as those of various US states a website will have to go for the most all encompassing definition to cover both. So having the W3C define something reasonable, and having nations decide whether they want to accept that, or basically create something unworkable more likely to result in their region being blocked than anything useful, would be an improvement.)

So we have a potential solution that doesn't involve the extreme "Upload your driver's license and other forms of ID and basically reveal to the world who you are and fuck anonymity just when we need it most" garbage, we just need to implement it.

The question then becomes: would Reddit support it under threat of prosecution? My guess is they would. My guess is Facebook, Reddit, X, etc, would happily mark their websites as adult-only to comply with a social-media-adults-only law. They wouldn't be happy with it, but the alternative, which blocks adults too, is worse.