Top all-time · #1298
Stephen Colebourne
Personal blog · blog.joda.orgprogramming
Stephen Colebourne's personal blog at blog.joda.org covers programming. Since 2011, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 67 times, most often “Oracle’s Java 11 trap”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 35 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Stephen Colebourne's blog for Joda-Time versus java.time, Java licensing and release policy, and his critiques of Scala. Commenters cite the posts for Java background and history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 35 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts and Musings on the world of Java and beyond
Most-linked posts?
- Oracle’s Java 11 trap5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-09-26
- Yammer moving from Scala to Java4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-11-29
- Why JSR-310 isn't Joda-Time4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-12-21
- Java 9 has six weeks to live4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-02-05
- Java is still available at zero-cost3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-08-29
- From Java 8 to Java 112 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-06
- Time to look beyond Oracle's JDK2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-08
- Should you adopt Java 12 or stick on Java 11?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-31
- /2009/03/sun-apache-ip-in-pictures_9067.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-19
- Scala Feels like EJB 2 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-11-22
What Hacker News says?
The author of Joda-Time actually thinks that even Joda-Time didn't get it quite right, and believes the java.time libraries in Java 8 and above (aka JSR-310[1]) are better than Joda-Time: https://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda-time_4941... It turns out that abstractions for time are really hard to get right. [1] https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310
Comment linking /2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda-time_4941.html
on “I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride”Submitted Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation as a story · 509 points
HN discussionHere is the rebuttal which shows that this is patently false for all actual use cases: http://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero...
Comment linking /2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero-cost.html
on “Java’s new garbage collector promises low pause times on multi-terabyte heaps”Submitted Oracle’s Java 11 trap as a story · 478 points
HN discussionNo, Stephen Colebourne has recently written a blog post [1] on that subject. [1] http://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero...
Comment linking /2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero-cost.html
on “Java’s new garbage collector promises low pause times on multi-terabyte heaps”- Jd · 2011-11-29
Submitted Yammer moving from Scala to Java as a story · 187 points
HN discussion This saga goes back to Sun Microsystems and Apache Harmony. Harmony, as originally announced was to be an Apache 2.0 License cleanroom reimplementation of the Java platform, complete with the standard library and a VM [1]. There was a lot of confusion [2] going forward, because copyleft folks like GNU were working on Classpath, a similar project, under the GPLv2, and none of that code was license-compatible with the…
Comment linking /2009/03/sun-apache-ip-in-pictures_9067.html
on “Google scored points with its community by supporting Kotlin”Submitted Java is still available at zero-cost as a story · 175 points
HN discussionIt seems like such a long time ago since Sun/Oracle and Apache Software Foundation fought over the licensing of the Java Technology Compatibility Kit (Java implementation test suite) for Apache Harmony, their JVM and Java class library implementation which was used as part of Android for a long time.[1,2] Hopefully OpenJ9 will meet with better success. On paper, it seems to meet the restrictions that Oracle currentl…
Comment linking /2010/10/no-java-7-end-game_4619.html
on “Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM”Submitted Time to look beyond Oracle's JDK as a story · 173 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.joda.org/2011/08/common-java-method-names.html?... has some background into the logic of static factory naming, covering from() and of().
Comment linking /2011/08/common-java-method-names.html?m=1
on “Java Virtual Threads Preview”Submitted Scala Feels like EJB 2 as a story · 141 points
HN discussionI believe you're mistaken. The article is saying that there are two versions of Java, and one has the license that you mentioned while the other is free and open source. From that article: https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-... > As well as their commercial JDK, Oracle produce an OpenJDK build. It is $free, zero-cost and GPL licensed (with Classpath exception so safe for commercial use) . Do…
Comment linking /2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-11-trap.html
on “The future of Java and OpenJDK updates without Oracle support”Submitted Big problems at the timezone database as a story · 103 points
HN discussionThe latest versions of Java will continue to be free. All you need to do to "pay" for that is remain up to date. Only maintenance on older versions of Java will be subscription based. Only free for non-production use. This was on HN yesterday: https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-...
Comment linking /2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-11-trap.html
on “The future of Java and OpenJDK updates without Oracle support”Submitted Time Zone Data Returns as a story · 68 points
HN discussionNoteworthy, the oracle JDK license has apparently changed so you can't legally use their distribution for much of anything except for the development of inhouse java applications? So I guess you can't even use it just for its JRE to run, say, eclipse for PHP development, or to host a servlet web server? Anyways looks like the OpenJDK is now on feature parity and is GPL licensed. https://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is…
Comment linking /2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zero-cost.html
on “Java 11 released”Submitted Java 9 has six weeks to live as a story · 63 points
HN discussionIt's pretty straight forward to migrate from Joda to Java 8's builtin classes though. Just remove the dependency on Joda Time and let the compiler tell you which files to fix. This blog post lists which Java 8 classes replace their Joda Time counterparts: https://blog.joda.org/2014/11/converting-from-joda-time-to-j...
Comment linking /2014/11/converting-from-joda-time-to-javatime.html
on “You Don't Need Moment.js”Submitted Var and val in Java? as a story · 49 points
HN discussionIt does not seem to be uncommon to recommend staying away from the non-LTS releases. It is probably not only up to you whether or not your software supports the next JDK release; all your tooling and libraries need to do so as well. See http://blog.joda.org/2018/02/java-9-has-six-weeks-to-live.ht... for more insight.
Comment linking /2018/02/java-9-has-six-weeks-to-live.html
on “JDK 10: General Availability”Submitted Scala as EJB 2: feedback (incl. Fantom comparison,funny comments as a story · 45 points
HN discussion"Constantly making waves" is probably more accurate from the days back when Tony Morris was active on the mailing lists. Paul, I believe, also made a fair bit of waves back in the day, but for some reason his were always much more palatable. (He has a very good writing style and is never, that I really remember, flat out mean.) I guess the big waves I remember are essentially about a post a week from Tony. The hoopl…
Comment linking /2011/11/scala-feels-like-ejb-2-and-other.html
on “Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler”Submitted Java switch – 4 wrongs don't make a right as a story · 16 points
HN discussion"If you're using Java 8, you can use the excellent new Optional type. If a value may or may not be present, wrap it in an Optional class like this" While I agree with most things, overuse of Optional like this is an antipattern IMO. Having done a lot of Java 8 development, I find Optional is best for return types, but otherwise forcing callers to wrap values in Optional is unnecessary as opposed to something like Sc…
Comment linking /2015/08/java-se-8-optional-pragmatic-approach.html
on “Better Java – Resources for Writing Modern Java”Submitted Java 9 has six weeks to live as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWhereas i'd say it should definitely be based on Stephen Colebourne's ThreeTen, which is the successor to Joda-Time: http://www.threeten.org/ http://blog.joda.org/2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda-time_4941.... The language constructs might not be as close to Rust's, but the semantics benefit from years of additional experience and thought.
Comment linking /2009/11/why-jsr-310-isn-joda-time_4941.html
on “Rust libraries that need to be written”Submitted Should you adopt Java 12 or stick on Java 11? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion>Joda-Time doesn't copy 100% java.util.date but I don't know what the threshold is. I think they're safe, especially given that the process has actually come full circle now. The new date time package in Java 8 (java.time) was developed under JSR310, whose spec lead is none other than the developer of Joda-Time, Stephen Colebourne [1] For those that are interested, he wrote an interesting blog post way back in 2009…
Comment linking /2014/02/new-project-threeten-extra-for-jdk-8.html
on “Rust libraries that need to be written”Submitted JPMS modules for library developers – negative benefits as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
