Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN repeatedly recommends it as the definitive explanation of why Java evolves cautiously and why compatibility matters in language design.
What it is
Java Language Architect Brian Goetz talks at a Clojure conference about the challenges of evolving a mature language like Java while preserving compatibility with existing code and developer expectations. It also gives a look at where the platform is headed.
Recommended by 10 HN commenters across 9 different months, 2014 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec nickik · 2014-12 · on “Introducing .NET Core”
Watch this awesome keynote by Brian Goetz, he talks about valie types and generics. Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts [this video]
Strong rec elangoc · 2015-05 · on “Contributing to Clojure”
To add on to that... Even though, I haven't been involved in the contributing process for Clojure, but I thought it was interesting that Brian Goetz's keynote at the Conj 6 months ago was about stewardship, in particular, stewardship of the Java language: [this video] It gave me a better appreciation for the differing concerns of someone using a language or contributing a patch vs. someone designing & maintaining a language. In my day-to-day, I use languages other than Clojure, and I sorely miss the cohesive and good design. Brian Goetz's talk nails it on the head why the languages in my day-to-day are sub-optimal, even if they're currently the "new hotness"... at least for now...
Strong rec filereaper · 2016-07 · on “Oracle and the fall of Java EE”
On the topic of stewardship, I highly recommend this talk by Brian Goetz titled "Stewardship: the Sobering Parts" [1] Brian goes about how important compatibility is for the language, the concept not throwing customers code under the bus by bringing breaking incompatibilities. (ie Python 2 --> 3) Java has its warts and isn't "cool" but I respect their design decisions. [1] [this video]
Strong rec filereaper · 2017-09 · on “Moving Java Forward Faster”
Brian Goetz the Java Language Architect addressed the very points you raised in a talk called "Stewardship: the Sobering Parts" [1] I highly recommend anyone with these very valid concerns to view it once. [1] [this video]
Strong rec gw · 2017-11 · on “Chrome breaks the Web”
Against my better judgement I did a reverse image search and found the post that you found that screenshot from [1]. The post is full of people having exactly the sort of problems you would expect from an automatic software updater, along with instructions from Jeff on how to manually update using SSH and git. These things happen. The world is messy, and whether due to technical inadequacy or run-of-the-mill software updater bugs, web backends will not always be updated. As you've noted, this could eventually lead to security problems, and I agree -- but that doesn't justify intentionally breaking their code. To say that their breakage is justifiable because they'll be 0wned at some point an
Recommends serve_yay · 2014-12 · on “Java Doesn’t Suck”
It is only tangentially related, but I recommend this video from Brian Geotz, a Java language architect. He breaks down the challenges of adding features to the language, in a room full of Clojure devs no less. Worth a watch: [this video]
Recommends dloose · 2016-03 · on “JEP 286: Local-Variable Type Inference”
See Brian Goetz's talk on language stewardship ( [this video] ). I'm sure nobody wants to add new and interesting features to Java more than the people who work on the language every damn day, but they've made a strong commitment to the community to not break existing code.
Recommends wging · 2018-05 · on “Java 10 and beyond – a look at the potential language change”
As far as speed-of-evolution, it is worth understanding that the slower speed is at least partly a by-product of different goals. This talk, "Stewardship: The Sobering Parts" by Brian Goetz, is informative and well worth the watch: [this video]