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If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Andrew Binstock writes at Dr. Dobb's that a recurring prejudice in the forums where the cool kids hang out is against Java, often described as verbose and fading in popularity but Binstock sees little supporting evidence of Java being in some kind of long-term decline. While it is true that Java certainly can be verbose, several scripting languages have sprung up which are purpose-designed to spare developers from long syntactical passages to communicate a simple action, including NetRexx, Groovy, and Scala. As far as Java's popularity goes, normally, when technologies start their ultimate decline, tradeshows are the first to reflect the disintegrating community. But the recent JavaOne show was clearly larger and better attended than it has been in either of the last two years and vendors on the exhibiting floor were unanimous in saying that traffic, leads, and inquiries were up significantly over last year. Technically, the language continues to advance says Binstock. Java 8, expected in March, will add closures (that is, lambda expressions) that will reduce code, diminish the need for anonymous inner classes, and facilitate functional-like coding. Greater modularity which will be complete in Java 9 (due in 2016) will help efficient management of artifacts, as will several enhancements that simplify syntax in that release. 'When you add in the Android ecosystem, whose native development language is Java, it becomes very difficult to see how a language so widely used in so many areas — server, Web, desktop, mobile devices — is in some kind of decline,' concludes Binstock. 'What I'm seeing is a language that is under constant refinement and development, with a large and very active community, which enjoys a platform that is widely used for new languages. None of this looks to me like a language in decline.'"
The great part about Java is that there are so many libraries for it.
http://docs.guava-libraries.googlecode.com/git/javadoc/com/google/common/primitives/UnsignedInteger.html
Python, Perl, and Ruby are examples of other languages that don't support unsigned integers. These languages are independent of the underlying hardware and automatically upsize the integer to handle larger value. You can always use the AND operator to convert to an unsigned integer for C calls. (e.g. var & 0x0FFFFFFFF).
You're not a real programmer if you can't adapt to the lack of unsigned variables.
I consult in a lot of sectors. Banking, Insurance, New Media, Old Media, Start-ups, etc. People who want to leave Java for some new language are doing it because of a set of features. I've yet to come across anyone, let alone an institution, that wanted to leave Java because of Oracles court proceedings (I would assume against Google for Android).
There was tons of talks on OpenJDK at JavaOne. If Oracle is the next Microsoft you would think they would have put the hammer down on that. I didn't see any of that happening. In fact Microsoft's cloud support of Java is based on OpenJDK and that was a keynote item.
On the other hand, I do hear a lot of dissatisfaction from the MySQL folks. They are moving to Maria (or other DBs). That has little to do with Java.
The reason Java is still alive and well is because it is the OO language most schools, universities and colleges teach in their CS classes.
Which is both a blessing and a curse. I went through my programming undergrad classes in the last round they offered C and C++. It worked out well because my employer needed those languages and for me to be able to learn others quickly, such as Java and C#. My experience with classes in C++ and lower level bit-bashing in C gave me the knowledge in being able to create custom libraries and handle oddly defined standard binary blobs, such as DTED data.
This same employer stopped looking at my school afterwards simply because Java was the dominant language. The graduates being churned out had knowledge of data structures and libraries, but knew very little of the ins and outs of binary data streams, binary blobs, memory management, and all those other things that you need in C and C++ that Java gives you for free.
Yes, it's good to have an approachable basis for such a complicated field as programming (computer science/software engineering/development/etc..). However, going from C/C++ to Java is a lot easier than the other way around. There's a reason my professor called Java a "Training Wheels Language"
(chrome is 32 bit, and java 1.7 is 64 only.)
Total bollocks. Here's 32-bit Java for:
Windows
Linux (tarball)
Linux (RPM)
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun