Reply to post: Re: I'm still using Java 1.4

'Java 9, it did break some things,' Oracle bod admits to devs still clinging to version 8

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I'm still using Java 1.4

I can still assemble (though the young uns call it compile nowadays) IBM 360 assembler my Dad wrote before I was born

Old COBOL, FORTRAN, and LISP still generally works fine with the latest implementations, too, provided the programs don't rely too heavily on specifics of the underlying machine.

Our customers routinely build and run COBOL source code from the '80s and '70s, and there's probably some older stuff still in production somewhere. While newer versions of the languages and implementations have lots of new features, backward compatibility remains important. So you can mix COBOL-66 source and OO COBOL source in the same program, and build the thing to run natively or under JVM or CLR.

But as others have pointed out, that's often true for old Java source code too (albeit for a shorter timeframe since Java's only a couple decades old). The big problems are third-party components which aren't compatible with the newer language versions, churn caused by the short-lifetime releases (9 and 10), and the FUD caused by Oracle's change in licensing terms. While there are now a number of viable free Java releases (AdoptOpenJDK, Azul Community, perhaps the Amazon one, maybe some others), there was a period of several months when many organizations didn't have a lot of confidence in any of the available options.

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