> Java went three years, from December 1998 to February 2002
Oh hell no.
Sun was widely criticized for that boneheaded move, and for the whiplash everyone experienced in Java 5 when they changed that policy too fast.
The mass of changes in 5 left a lot of tools and thus people stuck in 1.4 for years. I started on a project a bit before 6 came out. It was processing data and I couldn’t use the collections API, because it had to run on an embedded system and Aicas was taking their sweet time catching up with all those changes. Four years later I was still using arrays for everything.
One problem with not changing at all for a long time is that everybody forgets what it means to change. Teams stop planning for it, developers get too used for things being they way they got to know over the years.
Then you get huge pills like Java 8 which took forever to be adopted in large corporations.
I have witnessed most of Java history play out, starting with Java 1.3 in 2000.
Looking back, I wish we had regular change cadence where new features are being slowly added at a regular pace so the versions don't feel like a completely new language and developers have time to digest the new possibilities.
It is interesting when you spend multiple years on various projects, each being in a state of migrating from 1.6 to 8. Or coming to interviews and the first question being asked is "Which version of Java are you working on right now?".
Similar problem with Ada. 2012 standard came and for a long time only AdaCore supported it... Now going for 202x I'm thinking only advocating small changes that don't reduce ease of reading code...
Oh hell no.
Sun was widely criticized for that boneheaded move, and for the whiplash everyone experienced in Java 5 when they changed that policy too fast.
The mass of changes in 5 left a lot of tools and thus people stuck in 1.4 for years. I started on a project a bit before 6 came out. It was processing data and I couldn’t use the collections API, because it had to run on an embedded system and Aicas was taking their sweet time catching up with all those changes. Four years later I was still using arrays for everything.