My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
&gt; My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.<p>My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs <i>that I didn&#x27;t bother to learn</i>.<p>And, geez, is the graveyard huge.<p>&gt; Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the correct version of Java installed on your computer was always a mess.<p>Java applets were never that big.  They didn&#x27;t work very well (for the reason you mention) and weren&#x27;t ubiquitous.  They also nearly all looked like shit.<p>But Java isn&#x27;t disappearing anytime soon.  Java is huge and it&#x27;ll have a legacy dwarfing COBOL big big times.  Many may not find Java sexy but the JVM is one heck of a serious piece of tech, with amazing tooling available.<p>And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.<p>Did anyone in the mid to late nineties &#x2F; early 2000s really discover Java and Java applets and thought: <i>&quot;Java applets is the tech that&#x27;ll catch on, I&#x27;ll invest in that&quot;</i> and <i>not</i> invest in Java itself?  To me Java was the obvious winner (not that it was that great but it was clear to me Sun was on to something).  And, well, compared to the other dead tech, at least if you learned Java applets you got to learn Java too so it&#x27;s not all lost.