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Java Named Top Programming Language of 2015 (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: What was the most popular programming language of 2015? According to the people behind the TIOBE Index, Java took that coveted spot, winning out over C, Python, PHP, and other languages. "At first sight, it might seem surprising that an old language like Java wins this award," read TIOBE's note accompanying the list. "Especially if you take into consideration that Java won the same award exactly 10 years ago." Yet Java remains essential not only for businesses, it continued, but also consumer-centric markets such as mobile development (i.e., Google Android). That being said, even big languages can tumble. (Dice link) Objective-C tumbled from third place to 18th in the past 12 months, thanks to Apple's decision to replace it with Swift. In 2016, TIOBE expects that "Java, PHP (with the new 7 release), JavaScript and Swift will be the top 10 winners for 2016. Scala might gain a permanent top 20 position, whereas Rust, Clojure, Julia and TypeScript will also move up considerably in the chart."
What has been your most-used (or best-loved) programming language of the last 12 months?
Ubiquity and Longevity are important. It takes a while to create Big software projects, so fad du-jour languages have an Achilles Heel here. Java is pretty much ubiquitous and is very long-lived (so far).
When you have large code bases and lots of people trained in a technology then you tend to use it even more. WORA (Write Once Run Everywhere) is a killer feature, and Java system written on architectures that are now less used (i386, Irix, AIX, Solaris, etc) work pretty much painlessly on new hardware. Java scales from the massive to the miniature and thanks to the talented people at Sun, Oracle and OpenJDK the performance of Java is pretty phenomenal.
I personally am writing a jet combat flight simulator (which I'm mostly keeping under the radar, for now) in Java. I never have to worry about multi-threaded CPU performance. Seriously, never. I only spend time worrying about the bottlenecks in the GPU. Java and OpenGL (via JoGL) are a potent combination. I will never go back to C++ if I can help it - Java libraries and tooling (I love IntelliJ IDEA and the JDK's VisualVM) are so much better. Long live Java !
Note that the 'language' is not slow, inefficient, etc. It's hard for a language to be anything.
Now the de-factor *runtime* implementation of said language... Actually isn't that bad either for most people. Yes, if you are an idealized developer writing the most efficient code possible, there is more absolute potential in a C implementation, however in practice the potential delta is extremely small compared to doing a 'good' implementation, regardless of which runtime is executing. A lot of code out there can see an order of magnitude performance improvement through improvements to the code in-place.
Java gets *particularly* a bad rap by being the first language to popularize the runtime as a 'performance friendly' strategy when their runtime was particularly bad, but mostly because by virtue of its popularity, all the less than best programmers are turning out code for it.
Of course, while I recognize that the usual criticisms are not as bad or not JRE's fault, I still hate the wrangling of java runtimes on a system...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you need a performant, statically typed language, there are better alternatives.
Sometimes you want a performant, statically typed language that also has a massive number of robust, mature open source libraries available for it. In general, if you want to do something that some other person conceivably may have wanted to do at some point in time, there's a Java library for it that has hundreds of users. Developing a load-balanced application server that uses websockets, communicates with a high-performance database, and uses PKI authentication? Heck, there's probably a maven stereotype that will take care of 95% of the boilerplate code for you. Not to mention the tools that are available -- there are few IDEs or profilers for any language that are as powerful as IntelliJ IDEA and JProfiler, for example.
Plus, learning something new is hard. Learning a new language can be tough enough, but it's far worse if you're switching frameworks on top of that. It doesn't matter if an alternative is better if Java is good enough and it's what you know.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
It won because it's the best programming language. You can go cry to your mama about that if you want.
And Java 8 has IMHO completely refreshed the brand from a programming perspective. I'm really enjoying Java again.
When it came time to build the next iteration of the company's flagship product I was overruled on moving to Java from Delphi for two reasons. First, because it was a Delphi shop, so it was considered a bad move because it was not our core competency. And second -- and this is what generated the most conflict -- was the notion Java was a dead language. I was confused and amused when this argument was first brought up and floored when it was seconded by the other lead programmer. And no matter how much I tried to point to Java's ubiquity and ratings I was voted down.
I really hope those two developers got a chance to read this story.
Mike? Todd? You there?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***