In fact, it was welcomed in open arms even being originally interpreted, because writing portable C or C++ code in 1996 was still a mess, even across UNIX flavours.

On my university no one got Sun's marketing money in 1998, yet the distributed systems, compilers design, and graphics programming, all adopted Java as the language for new teaching materials, as it sorted out several problem with the assignments.

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Yoric a day ago | parent [-]

Yeah, migrating from C++ was such a breath of fresh air!

Both awt and then Swing were pretty bad for anything beyond toy programs, though.

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pjmlp a day ago | parent | next [-]

Comparing to writing X11/Athena or Win32 in raw C?

Which is what the respective department was doing before.

Swing is great, it does suffer from bad defaults though.

Anyone serious about it, would be getting books like Filthy Rich Client, and additional libraries like JGoodies.

Granted, they only came to be around Java 1.4 timeframe.

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Yoric 20 hours ago | parent [-]

I was using OWL at the time, which I recall as pretty good.

Swing was nice to program, but had sluggish reaction time and more than a few bugs (speaking of Swing 0.9/1.0, never went much further).

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pjmlp 20 hours ago | parent [-]

OWL was quite good and one of my favourite C++ frameworks, but not something that was being used at my university on assignments that were mostly done on UNIX, which was my point.

	▲	Yoric 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, under UNIX, the UX landscape was really bad. I think that Qt was available already, but not quite open source.

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speed_spread 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Swing is so bad they built an entire product line of IDE out of it.