this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Programming
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Holy hell I’ve been out of that world for a hot minute. I got certified in Java 2 as a young lad in 2002 or so.
Have there been versions the whole way up, or did they skip and jump to match the year at some point?
So were you writing applets and swing applications? It was a completely different time! However, a lot of Java 2 code can sun on Java 25 with small changes!
Java switched to a rapid release cycle in September 2017, when the six-month, time-based release cadence was first proposed and implemented. Starting with Java 10 in March 2018, a new version is released every March and September.
Many Java versions are actually ignored by developers, who only use Long-Term Support (LTS) versions, that are released every two years.
I was doing enterprise stuff. Was a weird time dodging bullshit like j2ee “javabeans” stuff but picking out the signal from the noise.
Mostly did websphere hosted jsp stuff. Moved to that from… check it… J++. It was right in the midst of the MS v Sun lawsuit craziness.
Only did 2 years before a huge MS .NET enterprise pivot back to the dark side where I stayed for 20 years before jumping to embedded and rust blockchain stuff.
Time comes for us all
It’s an amazing adventure. I’m at the grey beard part. Good times.
Java 8 was a thing for a long time (source administered Hadoop clusters that were - and possibly still are - stuck on Java 8).
Java 8 was analogous to 1.8...for reasons.
I wanna say Java 11 (the version after 8) came out around 2011? After that the release cadence was somewhat steady. I think Java 21 landed around 2021?
(Note: I refuse to actually look any of this up.)
Edit: my refusal to look anything up immediately bites as someone else pointed out:
(Note: I continue to refuse to actually look anything up)
Yeah Java 2 was actually 1.2 for… same reasons