https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGSg4b_cZA
Instead of Nolan’s Odyssey, you can watch a documentary about Java for free.
Gosling sits at his “workbench” and drops the names of frameworks that don’t exist anymore, browsers barely anyone remembers.
Fresh Java developers are going to watch this and wonder: who are these old guys? Some kind of Party Congress. Where’s the new generation? Why are we talking about the future when everyone on screen is over 50?
At least the other participants drag Gosling back into the present — Project Loom, Spring, Hibernate, modern Java is all in there. Venkat shows up too, for some reason, can’t have one of these without him. Sharat is there as well — laid off from Oracle, but they kept him in the documentary anyway.
Swap the language in this video for JavaScript and, honestly, nothing changes. Whoever’s producing these has turned the format into a pipeline — sponsors love it, the audience loves it. Beats sponsoring conferences, which these days feels almost embarrassing. This, though — a whole film, a documentary, Netflix-style — now that’s classy.
Is it actually interesting to watch? Not really. Maybe as nostalgia — a little “look how young we were.”
It feels like all the ingredients are there. Top guests, a niche where you’re the undisputed leader. And yet something’s missing. Same thing happens with conferences: top speakers, decent content, and still something’s off — mechanical, like theater, jokes that feel rehearsed, lines that are technically correct but don’t land. You watch it and you can just tell: the director doesn’t know Java. Never wrote Java. Never lived through its grief (a decade to ship Valhalla) or its joy (var, streams, virtual threads).
There’s no love for Java in it. You’re better off rewatching JUG.ru videos from before 2015 — at least there, people genuinely care about what they’re talking about. Here it’s all mechanics, no life in it.
Good to see Tagir and Andrey, though — a genuine breath of fresh air. I honestly expected the whole thing to end with a sequel announcement about Kotlin. It didn’t. Shame.
What did you think? Write it up, and write it long — we love that in chat, as always.