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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.'"
Over datasets are in the terabytes. Calculations distribute over thousands of nodes and cores. Only in the 1990s was thre concern about efficiency. 64-bit JVMs have been a godsend. Formerly a FORTRAN-90/C++ shop.
Java allows seamless GUI front ends and web-service control.
The new features in Java-8 are very interesting.
No, I've seen pretty much that dynamic happen at Google where we use a lot of C++ and Java.
There are some places Java just can't follow C++ ... the Google core web search serving system is mostly C++ because it involves decoding extremely compact data structures at insanely high speeds, to the extent that the verymost inner code has branch prediction hints in it. Java can't do that nor will it ever be extended to do so. Lots of servers at Google are written in C++ for the same reason. I don't believe it's only 5% faster, the rule of thumb I see is you lose about 2x the performance by using Java when all the costs are taken into account (like constantly re-compiling the same code over and over on the live servers, the GC costs, etc).
Despite that, lots more code is written in Java, because the cost of using C++ is so high. Sure, when the sailing is smooth there isn't a huge difference between them as long as your libraries and support infrastructure are good, but the moment someone slips up and accidentally double frees memory on an error path you've got a problem that can take an entire team a week or more to track down. I've seen it and partaken in such bug hunts. There's nothing quite like trying to find memory corruptions that only show up in the production environment once a day, when you have thousands of servers.
Basically any programmer can screw up that way. Java strikes a reasonable balance between safety and performance, which makes sense even when you are a company like Twitter or Google.