If you code it in VBA, you won’t have to worry about future version updates. #futureproof
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Wow I actually had a boss that wore these pants and wouldn't let me upgrade from a decade out-of-date visual studio C.
We can upgrade our coffee?!?
What is it about Java where companies are hesitate to upgrade? Do the Java releases always bring breaking changes or are the companies that use Java have a culture of not prioritising tech upgrades?
Java for this flash in the pan mobile shit? Sure, they like breaking things.
Java for enterprise? No. They're probably only just finished converting that COBOL system to it, and they started 20 years ago. People have died while making it. They will never change anything.
I think it was 5 that decided to change everything on the parser level, and 11 that decided to change everything on the modules level.
Outside of those, Java has always been extremely backwards compatible. But last time I checked the ecosystem still didn't recover from that module semantics change.
I think many companies don’t actively maintain a large portion of their code base at all. So any amount of work, no matter how small, involves a “project” and “budget” and “approvals” to even assign somebody to the task of upgrading.
Then you have the testing and due diligence from whomever actually uses the thing.
Java 8 to 21 + spring boot 2 to 3 brought the need to change a lot of dependencies, but often they were drop-in replacements. That was mostly Jakarta stuff. On the Spring side, a lot of things we used were deprecated, but that was not related to the Java version.
Did not take a huge amount of time to upgrade anyway. But maybe our systems weren't the most complex in the first place, a lot of our applications were pretty small.
That can also have its own dependencies. I tried to update some relatively simple apps that ran on Java 8 with some Spring libraries (not Boot) and had to deal with the Jakarta stuff to handle it... Only to discover that the Weblogic Application Server we use doesn't support Jakarta just yet (or probably more accurately, STILL doesn't!)
Please, Hammer... don't hurt em.
Java? You'll be doing Cobol.
Is my boss going to the junior high dance in 1992?
if your bosses pants look like that don't take his swingline
bmy thapler
There's a Java version higher than 8?
One of my university professors wanted us to program using DrJava, so of course Java 8 it is.
Why did he want to use that? Because it was similar DrRacket, which he made us use in the previous term to program Scheme (which is just lisp for teachers). Of course that was just us being all modern and such, he himself used DrScheme, the deprecated precursor of DrRacket.
This guy is so old that my high school Systems teacher had him as her university professor.
He has a fancy current gen MacBook Pro that he uses for his stuff. Then when it's lesson time he whips out a windows 95 netbook and a daisy chain of adapters from VGA to thunderbolt.
That's so new! My stuff still requires version 1.8
/s
People are using a Java higher than 7? surprised corporate face
Y'all get Java 7?
Yeah in the final update of corporate "foundational security improvements", which was discussed in 2015.
Rumor has it that people aren't even allowed to put their passwords on sticky notes anymore as well!
I don't do Java. What is being implied here?
The company is using old proprietary software that breaks unless a specific java version is used. And don't want to upgrade/switch because it is too expensive.
And don't want to upgrade/switch because it is too expensive
Oh boy, you better have no employees or Oracle will make you pay for their existence:
https://www.oracle.com/in/a/ocom/docs/corporate/pricing/java-se-subscription-pricelist-5028356.pdf
This is why you have a shell company JUST for your employees that need to use Oracle.
You mean for the employees that will write Java?
"Oracle" is usually about the DB, and that is paid by the core.
You should really quiet down, how else are you going to hear anything?
Isn’t there an openjdk impl in like every major Linux distro repository?
And so I assume the same would be available for windows?
You assumed the switch needs to happen on the JDK. It's actually that we bought this software that depends on the old version with a perpetual license 18 years ago before every decided SaaS was god so we've got another 3 years left before ROI breaks even
Some crappy software actively checks for a specific version, and you can't work around that.
Can you edit the byte code with a hex editor to change that check?
Just build the OSS version of java-impl with the patched version number as expected by the shitty software.
Not if you want support from the vendor :p
yes, but that doesn't help if the software refuses to run on modern java
*Java 8
won't be updating to Java 21
~~happy~~ sad dev noises