Rating 26 years of Java changes

Summary

I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which was a massive release—I remember engineers at the time grumbling that the ever-present “Java in a Nutshell” book had grown to over 600 pages. I thought I’d take a look back at 26 years of Java releases and rate some of the language and core library changes (Java SE only) that have occurred over this time. It’s a very different language to what I started out with! I can’t possibly cover every feature of those releases, as there are just way too many. So I’m just going to cherry-pick some that seemed significant at the time, or have been in retrospect. I’m not going to cover UI- or graphics-related stuff (Swing, Java2D etc), or VM/GC improvements. Just language changes and core libraries. And obviously this is highly subjective. Feel free to put your own opinions in the comments! The descriptions are brief and not intended as an introduction to the features in question: see the links from the Wikipedia page for more background. NB: later features are listed from when they were first introduced as a preview. Java 2 – 1998 The Collections Framework: before the collections framework, there was just raw arrays, Vector, and Hashtable. It gets the job done, but I don’t think anyone thinks the Java collections framework is particularly well designed. One of the biggest issues was a failure to distinguish between mutable and immutable collections, strange inconsistencies like why Iterator as a remove() method (but not, say, update or insert), and so on. Various improvements have been made over the years, and I do still use it in preference to pulling in a better alternative library, so it has shown the test of time in that respect. 4/10 Java 1.4 – 2002 The assert keyword: I remember being somewhat outraged at the time that they could introduce a new keyword! I’m personally quite fond...