Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Dead Is Java? (jaxenter.com)
This week HackerRank reported Java is now only the second most popular programming language, finally dropping behind JavaScript in the year 2018.
Now long-time Slashdot reader shanen asks about the rumors that Java is dead -- or is it?
Can you convince me that Java isn't as dead as it seems? It's just playing dead and will spring to life?
This week one Java news site argued that Java-based Minecraft has in fact "spawned a new generation of Java developers," citing an interview with Red Hat's JBoss Middleware CTO. (And he adds that "It's still the dominant programming language in the enterprise, so whether you're building enterprise clients, services or something in between, Java likely features in there somewhere.") Yet the original submission drew some interesting comments:
Now long-time Slashdot reader shanen asks about the rumors that Java is dead -- or is it?
Can you convince me that Java isn't as dead as it seems? It's just playing dead and will spring to life?
This week one Java news site argued that Java-based Minecraft has in fact "spawned a new generation of Java developers," citing an interview with Red Hat's JBoss Middleware CTO. (And he adds that "It's still the dominant programming language in the enterprise, so whether you're building enterprise clients, services or something in between, Java likely features in there somewhere.") Yet the original submission drew some interesting comments:
- "The licensing scheme for Java kills it..."
- "Java programs still are 'the alien on your desktop'. They suck in many ways. Users have learned to avoid them and install 'real programs' instead..."
But what do Slashdot's readers think? Leave your own answers in the comments.
How dead is Java?
Not as dead as this laaaaarge portion of popcorn I'm making.
[sits back]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's just taking a while for Java to bleed out.
So that Oracle can get butt fucked by their decision to be so consumer unfriendly when it comes to their policies on Java.
Has Netcraft confirmed it?
Deader than the deadest dead deadly deaded dead dead. That is how dead Java is, so totally dead the dead even comment on how dead Java is dead. If it was buried it would be buried 86 feet down not just 6, thats how really deadly dead the dead Java is dead.
Between it's different versions, the security problems this brings, etc., it's dying fast in the professional environment. Browser APIs pretty much dropped most support. I don't see a lot of JSP servers, either. I don't know if it's truly dead, but unless it finds a deep specialty application I don't know about, Java is going away. And based on my experiences as a user and such, it should.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Deader than an appeal from Paul Manafort, alleging unfair boogey men.
It's alive and well server-side. It's dead on the desktop because it's dreadful, slow, memory-hungry and extremely annoying each time Oracle forcibly imposes things that break legacy applications.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...
Everyone on this site is expected to know, that Android is a Java userspace on a Linux kernel.
And that there's a load of servers still running Java anyway.
How dead is EditorDavid's brain? Get the answer here!
It's dead .. in that it's now the NUMBER TWO MOST POPULAR LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD?
Wow. Perhaps my understanding of the meaning of "dead" is misinformed.
The commentary here seems to center around Java as a language for desktop applications or similar.
It's not. It hasn't been for decades.
Java is used mostly to make enterprise-class server-side software. It's used extensively in the financial services sector.
Most of the code for any FI's web applications you interact with is Java. And so is all of the backend code.
And it's not going anywhere in that space.
Mainly indie games but you'd never know unless you go through the game's files. They come prepackaged with dependencies like a JRE and just run ... unlike .Net or other MS technologies that always seem to require some special version of a library installed system-wide. Go take a long walk off a short pier, VCredist!
Fun fact: I have 21 versions of VCredist installed on my computer at the moment.
I guess if Fuchsia eventually replaces Android, then yes, hopefully down for the count.
But mostly dead is slightly alive. Just like C, COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, LISP,....
It has its uses. It's not going away any time soon. It's no longer the new hotness, but it hasn't been that in a while either.
I install java on most my machines. I don't use it too terribly often, but when I do, the apps written in and running on Java seem as good as any other Apps. I don't see the problem.
Not sure why there's comments of licensing issues... it's a free download from Oracle's website, has been forever. Am I missing something? Do you need special permission to write java code and distribute it? I'm sure you might need permission to distribute the VM with your app, but that's not even necessary, for the reason I already stated.
I don't know it as a programming language, never had any interest in it. so can't really comment on that aspect of it.
Java isnâ(TM)t dying, dead, or going anywhere. Itâ(TM)s well on its way to becoming the next Cobol, you know, in twenty years or so.
The fact that you donâ(TM)t see Java doesnâ(TM)t mean it isnâ(TM)t there, running those vital systems for the enterprise. Hell, if I didnâ(TM)t know better I wouldâ(TM)ve guessed /. was running on Java.
Stopped using it in 2003.. never coming back.. never regretting it...
There is always hope for tomorrow
The thing I've recently heard about Java is that you are subject to Oracle's random whims. Right now, you can get and use the runtime environment and development environment for free, but you don't know if they will randomly decide to charge you a ton of money to use it and send an army of lawyers after you.
That seems to be the only "dead" part of Java, the idea that you can actually use it without Oracle screwing you over.
I say this as someone who's written .NET code for 17 years now - and last wrote Java back in University (1999).
The .NET Framework is kept constantly up to date by Windows Update. It might be nice if Java was a Windows "Feature" - and every month the latest version was downloaded with Windows updates. Microsoft has been embracing open source, and supporting other platforms for years. I like the new Microsoft.
Java apps shouldn't be an alien, and choice benefits developers and eventually consumers.
That's a little bit like asking "is Linux dead?", simply because it's not a popular desktop OS. Just because the majority of users don't realize they're interacting with something, doesn't mean it's not widely used. In the case of Java, the Android platform is a major client-facing deployment. However, the majority of enterprise and webservices are still Java/Java EE and that application is growing, driven by the move to the cloud and the popularity of microservice architecture in new enterprise installations.
JavaScript obviously is a bit deal too, given the increasing importance of heavy client-side web-apps. But most of those webapps have Java on the back end.
Java's been dead on the desktop forever. Oracle isn't doing it any favors either. But OpenJDK is alive and well, and Spring and spring cloud are very popular, performant, scalable tools that we use every day. Yes, we're dabbling in Node for purpose-built microservices more and more, but Java has always been and will continue to be a good choice for many server-side projects.
- Vincit qui patitur.
- No
*) Huge existing codebase in the Enterprise workplace that will need to be supported for many, many years.
*) Enterprise also tends to hate a multi-language environment. "Java is the what we mainly use so everything where possible, even new projects, will still be Java".
- Yes
*) Outside of Enterprise almost no one starts a new application based on Java anymore. Try and think of a single start-up using it...
It's still populated by 141 million people and it's been a while since the last gigantic eruption, so it ain't dead at all.
But not as dead as SNOBOL
If you post it, they will read.
Mainly because using it in your enterprise now really requires going all in with Oracle and that's an expensive proposition. There are so many better and cheaper alternatives that it's hard to recommend that.
It's definitely not dead. It's still a primary goto for server-side programming, there's still android, and recent releases have been inching toward the script language community. What is dying:
* Reliance on Oracle. My company & lots of others are cutting everything Oracle out of the equation & just using OpenJDK.
* Desktop java -- it's unlikely to ever make major inroads at this point. JavaFX was a nice try but it's not likely to make it.
* J2EE -- it's technically still alive but isnt well liked, I don't expect much new to be built on top of it
Kotlin is great. Kotlin is like Swift, if Swift were done by competent people. And if you're one of those insufferable functional blowhards, then Scala is also good.
[quote]“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” - Bjarne Stroustrup[/quote]
.. That kind of dead.
Seriously though new adoption may be slowing but there is a _lot_ of software out there running it.
I have to second this option. Java isn't "dying"...it's 2020's Cobol.
It'll be around for at least the next 10-20 years. (There's that much code based of Java out there)
But Java has been dying for years. Applets died a long time ago. JSP and Servlets are pretty much dead in favor of using a JavaScript front-end and a proper application back-end. JDBC will continue to hold java for a number of years...but watch as other languages start taking it's place. Hell, Docker killed Java's last remaining strength - write once, run anywhere. With Docker, everywhere became X86-64bit.
I don't expect C# to do well either.
Java isnt sexy, but t makes money and gets the job done.
it's pinning for the fjords,
Java Applets (browser plugin)? Dead.
Java desktop apps? Dead. Nobody's going to argue that.
The Java language is far from dead in the enterprise. Those who use it there will gladly pay Oracle for their production systems, and use OpenJDK everywhere else. There is a crap ton of existing code out there being maintained, and new code all the time.
Java is far from dead outside of the enterprise too, on mobile. Not the way Oracle would have liked it with everybody using JavaME, but on Android, which is what has really breathed some new life into Java (not so much Minecraft). The lawsuit there has soured many on Oracle and Java, and it looks like Android may be moving away from it at some point down the road - which makes me sad because we've only just gotten Kotlin support. And Kotlin is a better Java.
I'm keeping my eye on Kotlin native and the javascript compiler. but the open source Java ecosystem has some pretty great libraries (moshi/jackson/gson, retrofit, okhttp, poi, bouncy castle,etc.)
Use AdoptOpenJDK works perfectly fine.
https://adoptopenjdk.net/support.html#roadmap
Java is dead on Android. Oracle made sure of that when they sued Google's use of Java in Android.
Java has an image problem, not due to the fact its desktop frameworks look ugly but also that it looks ancient as object-oriented programming, licensing and performance trends go. It has a public relations problem, but for those that are in the industry, its pretty obvious its life-support system is alive and well.
If you look outside the desktop, Java is fine. As previously stated, Java is core to business players - it serves a central purpose in many middleware, server and database-related solutions. Then there's the fact that Oracle is its owner and major sponsor, and RedHat closely behind it both maintain its momentum, while its essential role in the world's largest mobile platform accelerates it. Some will say even in Android Java is faltering, but Kotlin avid programmers know full well that, like Kobol and other tech in critical applications, Java will take decades to be detached from Android. The same can be side about the businesses solutions where it is central.
So while Java's core language development might stall in favor of supporting cooler, "du jour" paradigms that act as stepping stones for new players to have something fresh to stand upon, the JVM and its many clone runtimes are here to stay. And while languages that code for them keep basing themselves off of Java for bytecode endgame, so is Java.
I.Work.for.Oracle.I.use.Java.every.day.it.is.great.thank.you.larry.
Emotionally, Java died for me the day I discovered that C# has real, honest to god unsigned bytes. You have to be masochistic beyond words and the world's ULTIMATE glutton for punishment to attempt programming OpenGL ES using Java, because GLES does EVERYTHING by juggling around byte arrays, and dealing with raw unsigned bytes in Java is pure misery.
It's no secret that 'unsigned bytes' are one of (if not THE) most-requested features in the history of Java. And the one that evokes the angriest ideological debates, often getting it called 'syntactic sugar' (as if providing a language construct to avoid having to do things known to create STAGGERING numbers of insidious code errors due to typos is a morally-decadent thing).
Personally, I love how some people get all righteous about calling unsigned bytes 'syntactic sugar', then proceed to defend dumping six pounds of 'syntactic salt' into Java in the form of the way Java now handles lambda expressions.
Lambda expressions per se aren't necessarily a bad thing. Pretty much every major language now has them. But the specific WAY they were implemented in Java is an abomination. Put bluntly, they're basically "human-compiled" object code PRETENDING TO BE actual source code.
For anyone who doesn't understand what I just said, here's an alternate explanation. Basically, when the Java compiler sees a Lambda expression, it recursively searches through the list of interfaces known to it until it finds an interface that defines a single method whose arguments match the types of those used by the lambda. It takes the compiler (or IDE) a fraction of a second to do a brute-force search through the API to find a match. Humans, unfortunately, aren't quite so agile at things like that, which is why we invented source code in the first place 50 years ago.
Behind the scenes, the compiler is just automatically assembling an anonymous class that implements the interface. And if you had the sourcecode TO that anonymous class in front of you, making sense of it would be easy. The problem is, Java's lambda syntax strips away most of the contextual information that the anonymous class would provide you with, so you're left trying to make sense of a cryptic glob of punctuation characters that makes obfuscated Perl look like Ada or Visual Basic by comparison.
The end result is that if I write a nontrivial program using Java lambda expressions, print out a method, and hand it to you, there's a VERY high likelihood that you'll scratch your head and be completely unable to make sense out of it without at least looking back at the includes near the top, and probably a few minutes with Google. In contrast, if those lambdas had been printed in the source AS anonymous classes implementing the same interface, you'd probably be able to effortlessly make sense of them without a second thought. And that's what's fundamentally wrong with Java Lambda Expressions, in a nutshell. They optimize the wrong problem, and result in sourcecode that's human-unreadable.
Mainly Oracle. Those guys suck. I have 1 rule for all Oracle dealings.
Never buy anything but a DBMS from them and only for the 1% of your business critical DBs that can't be handled by **any** other option.
And if the Oracle sales guys start talking about "cloud" anything, pull out a voice recorder, turn it on and put it in the front of them and ask them to start over.
If it isn't clear already, avoid using any F/LOSS that Oracle sponsors - no mysql, especially. Really should be using Postgresql anyway.
Has anyone ever heard of it before the post on Slashdot? Its not like this was Tiobe whom we've seen around forever.
I went out to *BSD's grave on Decoration Day. The old forgotten cemetery is to be found adjacent to the dark woods beyond the edge of town. There within olfactory distance of the municipal treatment plant you will find *BSD's final resting place.
*BSD's tombstone was shrouded by thick mosses and knots of noxious ivy. A mournful funerary crow sounded the requiem, as I gently pulled aside the tangled twists of thorns, and cleaned the decaying marker the best I could. A suffocating melancholia filled my heart, while I pondered that this indeed was *BSD's figurative charnel house of which so many have plaintively spoken.
Nothing is so pitiful as an untended grave, a loved one now forgotten. The short sad life of this doomed and fated OS makes us realize that there but for the grace of God go all of us.
I planted some wilting marigolds, found discarded in the waste heap behind the caretaker's shack, wishing that by some miracle these fleurs de mort might take root and bring a modicum of cheer to *BSD's God forsaken plot. My fervent hope is that the torpid colored boy, who so carelessly mows the grounds, doesn't slice them down, inadvertently mirroring *BSD's own doomed encounter with death's irresistible scythe.
Funny how things work out. Linux, that brilliant nova stella, now runs the Internet and the world's fastest computers, while *BSD lies moldering within its forgotten crypt. Let the barren silence of *BSD's tomb be a mute reminder that hubris and braggadocio were no defense on that woeful day when the Angel of Death's bleak umbra was cast upon *BSD.
But there's LOTS of places it's alive and well...
The web world is dominated by Javascript, Node etc. and the Data world has been taken over by Python. There is nothing called Java except for those who want to feel good about their archaic skills.
It's called JHipster. You probably haven't heard of it.
There's a segment of the community that looks at their desktop computer and assumes that anything that they don't personally use is dead.
In fact, Linux and Java are the most used software in the world. Linux runs nearly everything that isn't your desktop computer, and a fairly substantial number of the applications you interact with over networks are Java.
Just because it isn't executing on your terminal doesn't mean you aren't using it.
According to Slashdot and others, Java has been dying for the past 15 years. The short answer is, no, it's not going anywhere. There's tons of Enterprise code written in Java that will need to be maintained for years to come.
Java is not even a little dead. What is this shit doing on Slashdot?
It's dead for the regular user. There's next to no instance where Java will come into play for a mainstream user.
It's somewhat alive for gamers... if you play the java version of Minecraft.
It might be alive for server sides, but I haven't personally use anything Java in years on my servers.
Somehow, Java became screaming fast and/or Lucene manages to avoid all the parts of Java that are screaming slow. Therefore Elasticsearch. Therefore that's one very good reason that Java won't go anywhere right away.
Also, despite the existence of obviously saner alternatives like REST, many enterprises use Java as a standard for service bindings. Long ago lost to the sands of time is the original intent that XML was intended to be human-readable (in the sense of not needing binary decoding) but not human-written.
I wrote a lot of semi-interesting Java in the past, and I suppose there was a time when I liked it, but I can't see that time coming again. Java is annoying. It's that grumpy, square, didactic, great uncle whose clothes haven't been updated since the 70s and whose house smells musty and who tells you about how he took no shortcuts in his life and you can't either.
Python is annoyingly gimpy (what sort of interpreted language deliberately doesn't have closures and first class functions?) but at least you can write a command-line tool in it, and maybe some day it'll be fast too. I guess dumbed down is better than a smelly old uncle.
Maybe I'll get to write some Rust soon.
It's dead in every purpose it was meant to be used
Games - Minecraft is rubbish and hobbled by Java. Microsoft makes no secret it would rather it have been in C# (the language it invented when Sun told Microsoft to butt out of trying to make a propietary Java), but Minecraft is VERY hobbled by Java.
No games should be developed in Java that aren't meant to be proof-of-concept. The reason is pretty obvious, Java's runtime evolves with bugfixes and in turn breaks all previous versions of Java. Java is worse than C and C++, because at least revisions to C and C++ don't break forward compatibility.
On the web, Java is dead, and has been dead a long time. On the server, maybe not as much. Java is completely dead in the mobile space as well.
But it's a language that had a lot of promise early on in 1998, but Sun utterly wrecked it, and Google didn't learn Microsoft's lesson, and thus Java is garbage now.
I'm just here for the PASCAL
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Check out the job offers in indeed.com so that you know just how popular Java is compared to anything else.
"Java programs still are 'the alien on your desktop'. They suck in many ways. Users have learned to avoid them and install 'real programs' instead..."
We get bombarded with JavaScript based applications instead and while they suck a lot less than Java Desktop apps (Eclipse is a big PITA, IntelliJ sucks a little less), and now we have things like Slack, Atom, Visual Studio Code,
I have been using TextMate for over a decade but the lack of good 'runtime' awareness features have forced me to try Visual Studio Code on Mojave ... and while I keep on cringing about the 'wrong' look and feel for a macOS app ... the feature-set for Python 3.7 and Terraform development is really awesome so I keep on using it, bouncing back and forth to TextMate if only for the brute force search and replace or looking through long logs.
I really wish they could make it feel more like a proper macOS app, especially use the native font rendering rather than whatever rendering engine they use, but I accept that the feature-set would just not be on par. How is Xcode these days for Python, Terraform, Shell?
it, fell, to, number, two.
That's a little bit like asking "is Linux dead?", simply because it's not a popular desktop OS.
The desktop is dead anyway. Linux is dominating on smartphones/tablets. Java is right there alongside dominating too, although not for long given Oracle's insanely boneheaded move to sue Google over their use of Java in Android.
Java used to run most online banks where i live, it was phased out because of all the bugs and security problems, and it even got to the point where banks would advertise "non-java- login methods".
I think the only thing that get new devs into Java now is Android.
I'd say it's fast zombie, as opposed to slow. Possibly infected with rage after a bite from Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Calling the NUMBER TWO LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD, dead? That's just Click-Bait. By that logic, there is only one living language, JavaScript, and All other languages are on their way to extinction. Now, if Java were to drop to #5, one might be a little concerned and if it dropped below #10, then you could say it is a dying language. But seriously, the biggest problem it has it its license and Oracles past behavior concerning it. Those definitely have muddied the water for a long time. I expect to see Java as one of the 10 primary languages for business for between the next 10 and 20 years. Maybe longer since most internal business programs last for at least 10 years, and the bigger the user base for the program, the longer. Maybe in 30 years Java will become like Cobol, still supported, but actively being migrated away from. Perhaps Julia or something similar might be the reigning language then.
For years we have had to deal with crappy apps that did not work or worked only on one version of Java. If you upgraded you were screwed. If you didn't then you were open to Java attacks. Vendors are beyond slow to update and to work out bugs to get their software to work on the next version of Java. The biggest issues are how SLOW Java is on Windows. Oracle still has not fixed that to this day. The worst was I had to support a software on Java 1.4 that is 10 or 15 years old and the vendor was locked into the version!! What a nightmare!!. Thank God no credible vendor uses Java for applications anymore.
MAYBE 2025's COBOL, not 2020. More likely 2030's or 2035's COBOL (relative to the position COBOL enjoyed in 2000). COBOL now is aggressively dying, So many COBOL software systems have been ported to Java as a replacement. I fully agree though that on the desktop or browser, it has dwindled drastically. And, from what I have heard about CERNER, Java EJB is a challenge when trying to scale up from 4 hospitals to, say, 150 integrated hospitals.
Java is the best for security and speed.
With Java, all you need to get started is:
-at least 4 cores, at 3.0Ghz+
-at least 16Gb of RAM
-a few hundred GB of disk space for helper libraries, and compatibility libraries
-a little bit of patience.
For example, "Hello World" compiles and runs in just minutes under eclipse! and it gets fast with each iteration!
these are very minimal specs, everyone has a machine with at least this nowadays, everything else is just a toy.
Security takes a bit of memory, and Performance demands a multi-core CPU. Throw away those dual-core machines, and anything under 16Gb is just trash anyway.
Java is write-once, run anywhere, as long as you meet the minimum specs!
So the article is obviously a stupid flame bait question which I really don't have much direct response to, since I've not been doing any with with Java for some time - either client or server.
Instead of reading responses or the article, I ended up finding this amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe, making said cookies, and then eating them to verify the claims the recipe was as good as it claims - it is.
Instead of me arguing the case for or against Java with others here, I thought all of *you* could use a great recipe for chocolate chip cookies, especially with Valentines day coming up - even if you are single it's a great emotional boon to make cookies for yourself!
So - Here's the recipe for favorite chocolate chip cookies.
Pay special attention to the text just above the actual recipe that mentions roasting the nuts that go in the cookies first, I agree that made it extra awesome.
Mods: I totally understand an off topic mod here, but please only one so that others may see this amazing recipe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The programmers are just terrible because most of them wanted to be in IT management already and it's been two whole years.
"Can't I write an excel marco? Does it have to sort based on server-side data, or can I just send it all to the page at once? Why can't we just show and hide it?"
I feel like Java 8 is a completely different language anyway and now most of the people who wrote Java will be dead soon or get their management position. Open jres run fine, so I don't think anything Oracle says or does even matters at this point. They just want to sell certifications.
Almost all ip kvms run java. there are two companies that don't as far as i can tell.
java in embedded things is a nightmare.
-
COBOL is still around. Java is so widely used it'll take an awfully long time to truly die off. I do wish it would go away completely.
Probably not your desktop. It was never well suited for that, Besides, desktop apps are kinda crusty things nowadays. Most people spend most of their time in a browser, playing games, MS Office, or Photoshop. That is pretty much it.
Not saying you are wrong. But think about this. Would you start a greenfield project in it? Would you use it at home for your own projects? Would you recommend someone doing either of those things? That is how I define a language for 'dying'. The 'oracle problem' is going to be a big one for many small orgs. It is why things like MySQL took off (and why Oracle snapped them up), now postgres. For most everyone the cost software is going towards 0 in value and price. Oracle trying to put it back is basically going to end them. But not before they cut everyone to ribbons who comes near them. Wasting a lot of court time and money and peoples time.
For example where I work the 'java license' is a non issue. They will negotiate with oracle. Give them a very large sum of money (not as much as Oracle wants but still huge) and go on with life. They will not even really blink. There is no real replacement in the org I work in. They are running in the opposite direction of python. Typescript/node on the front end. But the backend will be pretty much all java.
Javas problem now is cost and legal haze. On a bit o hardware I paid less than 1k for I am not going to run enabler software that costs 3x plus the 'real' software I want to run.
It will not be Julia. It will be something else. I would not even bother to guess for 30 years out.
The nerds of the world, especially those at Slashdot have been trashing Java since it came out. Javascript's rise comes in the same manner that Java's did, with so much power and memory, efficiency in running doesn't matter. Why aren't we asking about C and C++ while we are at it, they just went down a notch as well. This is just click bait knowing how much most of these readers hate Java. It's like asking "is this the beginning of the end for Trump?".
Fuck off. I made money for ages with java. Money is life. Entropy. Qed
I'd guess that Android software is the number 1 use of Java these days. But Oracle says Google's version of "Java" doesn't count, and they have to stop using it. If they do that, Android developers will go where Google tells them to go, they won't stay behind to use the "pure" Java language from Oracle.
In 1962 it was revolutionary. It could process a bank's load of transactions on a machine with less than 64K of memory. And fast. No garbage collections. No unnecessary data transforms, just suck the data in, map it to a record, process it, and spit it out.
Data section that properly described structures. And separate from the procedure section so that a compiler could run in two separate overlays, important on small machines.
The code was pretty easy to read. No nasty pointer arithmetic.
Then came Object Cobol...
Of all the things that annoy me about Java unsigned bytes has never hit to top of the list. Normally they are just bytes, and we simply do not care about the sign because we do not do arithmetic on them. And if we do it is trivial to fix.
C# has many advantages. The inbuilt query language is very cool. But unsinged bytes?!!
And there is no search for interfaces for lambdas at all. It is in the declaration of the place you are adding it. Java is all explicit typing, Perhaps you are confusing it with Go?
This is actually the aspect of the question that triggered my submission, but not even sure how the AC came to my attention. In an attempt to update Java on one of my machines, I realized it was uninstalling itself completely, which got me to check and realize that it was already gone elsewhere. Apparently the browser plug-ins are no longer supported, so bye-bye. Thanks, Oracle. For nothing. Literally.
I definitely noticed that almost none of my students last semester were doing much with Java, which surprised me. Lots of Python and C++ and various other languages were mentioned, but almost one of them were primary in Java. These are seniors and graduate students at a top university, with a heavy delegation from China, too.
So time to probe the discussion a bit more to see if I can find any actual insights into what's going on. Or at least a few jokes?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
At one time, Java was my most-used language, dominating the server-side and also being used for Android. These days, my most used languages are ECMAScript/JavaScript on the server (and browser), Swift for iOS, and Kotlin for Android.
I don't think my anecdotal experience is evidence that Java is dead or dying, but it wouldn't surprise me if Java's use is declining, generally. But that's no big deal. Originally, my most used language was C. Then it was C++. Then it was Java. Et cetera. But C isn't dead. C++ isn't dead. Java's usage may decline, but I doubt it will "die" for a long, long, time.
Also, there's the JVM aspect to consider. Languages other than Java target the JVM: Kotlin, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, et cetera. I wouldn't be excited about coding in Java, these days, but I'm happy to code in Kotlin or Clojure.
I was seriously curious about the status of Java when I discovered that it was apparently uninstalling itself and vanishing from my browsers. My sincerely curious question was combined in an odd way with another story someone else submitted about the relative popularity of Java, which obviously is a call for popcorn.
I really haven't learned what I was hoping to, but my current theory (slightly modified by this discussion) is that Oracle basically murdered browser-based Java. Sun's original charitable model obviously failed as part of the collapse of Sun that allowed Oracle to acquire Sun and maul its assets. I'm not sure Sun really had much beyond Java and OpenOffice... I think the hardware and Solaris are mostly gone or irrelevant, but it scarcely matters since Oracle's real interest was in how many of Sun's customers could be converted to Oracle.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Let's start with that, and maybe we can have a rational debate, with facts and arguments rather than opinions and emotional tantrums.
If I look at job openings in my market, Tulsa, there are as many Java jobs as C# and Python put together. Only a handful of C/C++ jobs--I say this as a 25+ year C++ developer. I would say that if demand means anything, Java is far from dead.
I wrote a software renderer for a 3D engine in pure Java (no JNI) back in the day. It was interesting getting it to perform acceptably but in the end it performed comparably to my C version which was a shock at the time. Java has a very undeserved reputation for not performing well. I'm guessing most people who feel this way were stuck using one of the horrendously over-engineered Java web frameworks that pile layer upon layer of cludge on what should be a fairly simple problem.
When your debugging a simple CRUD application and your stack traces are 200 calls deep (and it's not a recursive call) it's time to abandon ship.
I do avoid flash and java like the plague. Just too many security holes and too slow.
It is so not dead. The ecosystem around Java is huge and growing.
Shameless plug of a dev platform I have been working on in my spare time that is built on a Java foundation: IOVAR . It's kind of meant to be the swiss army knife for the world of XML and JSON with a Unix philosophy and shell that should make any grey-beard feel at home.
I know it's not close to ready for mainstream yet and there is still lots more to do on the documentation side but it IS usable and has been quite a fun adventure to work on! I've been working on it solo so far but now I feel it's time to start getting the word out and find out if anyone else also finds it useful.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Oracle's API lawsuits and other shenanigans means that no big co will want to bet the farm on it.
Table-ized A.I.
If you own a Blu-Ray Player or Blu-Ray disks you are using Java (Blu-Ray disks use a variant of Java ME for all their menus and interactive stuff and whatever else)
Cable set top boxes that use OCAP for interactivity and stuff (common in America) also use a variant of Java ME.
And I am sure there are still other embedded Java systems out there in use.
Your point about Docker rings a bell. It's all about providing a consistent platform. The Unix-type systems make a great platform because there are fairly standardized locations for each of the small, single-purpose components and yet no single language is dictated. One command may be a shell script, another a C program, and yet a third is a Python script and they are all able to work with each other thanks to that standardized platform.
The rest of this comment I also posted up above in reply to another user...
Shameless plug of a dev platform I have been working on in my spare time that is built on a Java foundation: IOVAR . It's kind of meant to be the swiss army knife for the world of XML and JSON with a Unix philosophy and shell that should make any grey-beard feel at home.
I know it's not close to ready for mainstream yet and there is still lots more to do on the documentation side but it IS usable and has been quite a fun adventure to work on! I've been working on it solo so far but now I feel it's time to start getting the word out and find out if anyone else also finds it useful.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
It's a huge ecosystem. The licensing is not an issue: everybody just uses openJDK.
I just recently discovered that a program, Syncthing, was written in the Go language. It somehow managed to end up on my machines and I have no problems with it. Unlike Java, it just looks a runs like a native app. The language itself is too alien for me, I leave it to the new kids to conquer it.
Some of us are still exploring ways to forge the dream of XML. In fact over the years I've been cobbling together this Java+XML+Shell bastard child of sorts that (in my biased opinion) is actually turning into a functional web development platform! I've only just recently put up the website and am still working on documentation but alas... I now present IOVAR.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Java is not dying, in spite of the spite spit upon it. It is still growing, albeit not always in full view of the clickerati. It has evolved more successfully than most languages, and satisfies most of its current domains. Also in spite of oft-declared non-existence, there is plenty of Java on the desktop in corporate applications, even as the applets have leveled off, though not yet totally disappeared. Methinks we have just another disgruntled languageX aficionado trying to drum up some more hate out of his misplaced jealousy. Probably got shot down on another proposal and lost out to Java yet again.
Oracle is sucking the life out of it.
Licensing complications. Sure, the OpenJDK exists, but you have to test your long standing and legacy applications against it. Of course, you should do that, because old versions of the Java runtime really have security issues. Oh and if you aren't careful and get caught in an audit, that can hurt.
Adding language Features. C# and .Net was dogging them a bit in this area. But type erasure and some other aspects of the type system still makes functional style code just clunky (special streams and functions for int, doubles, longs). The way they did lambdas was pretty hacky.
Modules and the new versioning. Java 9 added modules, but it's a bit clunky, to put it kindly. We have Java 10 and 11, with 12 to come, and nobody really wants to deal with new versions of the JVM on that rapid of a time scale.
But, he rate of adoption of Java 8 and newer features is slow. I still see tons of Java programmers that have never used streams. But, that hybrid functional/OO style can be very useful.
With Erlang/Elixir, .Net Core, Go, Python, NodeJS and even modern C++, Java is just being squeezed out in terms of being used for newer projects. But, with so much code out there, it will live for quite some time.
Nobody likes Oracle.
Java is dead. Oracle acquiring it was an absolute disaster for the community (I'm looking at you, Google). The current licensing is basically notice to the community that it's going away, because, oracle and sueballs. Nobody is basically going to risk it.
Kotlin as an alternative isn't an improvement. Someone really needs to use "The clue is in the name" when choosing keywords. omg.
the desktop is dying...
Actually it does not really matter that much anymore, programs have moved mostly towards webapps and mobile and desktop apps usually are nowadays mostly just that.
Java is alive and kicking in the server and mobile sektor.
It's literally fuckin' written in Java
What's wrong^WTrump with you??
Obligatory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuW6tQ0218
I agree that it is not an ideal language, especially regarding licensing, but there is no way Java is "dead". In the enterprise, SAP HANA, Oracle Cloud and Hadoop all use Java. Android development and the huge range of other devices that run Android depend on Java. It's also being deployed on lots of IoT devices. Also, universities still teach it to students (although Python is getting more popular in this space, especially in data science).
Not nearly as dead as it should be. It is unnecessarily complicated, it encourages overcomplicated designs, it is ugly and it is inefficient, because it is always interpreted. I have never understood why it ever became in the first place.
Oracle is going down. I'm currently in a project where we replace national service using Oracle with MariaDB. The project is using Java, but we are using OpenJDK. Only difficulty with licenses is trying to explain bosses by Oracle licensing doesn't concern us.
Only thing that could be killing Java is .NET, but that is mostly used to replace C++ in project, not Java, so I'm not sure if it is big issue. I would not personally ever pick any technology that is made by Microsoft, but hey, I was wrong nwith Silverlight, so I could be wrong again.
Eclipse... *cough* JDownloader... *cough*
... with all the ups and downs that comes with.
Massive legacy systems that no one dares to take down and are a mess and super expensive to maintain, with well paid job guarantees attached.
OTOH you have the new kids closing in left, right and center, new technologies for the VM (Kotlin, Scala, Closure, whatnot) and other VMs such as Node and Go, node with it's own massive set of PLs.
Java won't go anywhere anytime soon, that includes it sticking around for another few decades in the places it already dominates.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I really wonder where this fuzz about "Java is dead" always comes from. If you run a company -like I do- where you have to develop/maintain multiple SaaS products towards 150+ customers, you'll really learn to value Java. Of course, Java is dead for all the millennials that want to put whatever latest bullshit on their resume. But from a company-point-of-view, you want stability and maintainability so you can sleep at night, something that most developers out there don't give a shit about: the bigger mess they leave behind, the longer they can invoice their customer... the irony is that most CTOs, project managers blindly follow all those hypes, and thereby triggering tremendous maintenance costs on their company for the coming 5-10 years.
I look at all the Javascript frameworking and REST/OAuth jokes from a safe distance and praise myself everyday that I don't have to maintain projects infected with all this nonsense. Java EE 6/7, JSF, easy peace of mind.
What bigdata? Hadoop is as dead as Java it runs on. Elasticsearch is slowly going down too. And Java is not the smallest of the reasons for it. No one wants the slow, memory hogging behemoth of a language running things.
For the server side, the Containers like Docker , Kube are the things, not JVM anymore.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Which brings us to the real answer for "How dead is java?":
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Itâ(TM)s Oracles switch to charging for a license to develop in Java is what is going to kill it.
Weâ(TM)ve already got vendors switching to other technologies for their web based apps.
Who's there?
(long pause)
Java!
Everyone on this site is expected to know, that Android is a Java userspace on a Linux kernel.
Most of the Android userspace is C++. The GUI frameworks expose Java APIs (though all of the drawing code, for example, is Skia, which is C++) but most popular applications include a lot of native code as well (I don't have up-to-date stats, but a few years back all of the top 50 most popular things in the Play store did).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Cannot speak for the whole ecosystem, but the few Java desktop applications I tried worked well and even started reasonably fast.
As long as there's a popular Minecraft JAVA Edition, JAVA will remain popular.
All Mods need to be coded in JAVA, which forces people to learn and use it.
I was on the Java train in the late 90's/early 2000's. When Oracle took over, I pulled the rip cord. I didn't believe that there was any way Oracle would do the right thing with Java, and to my eyes, they didn't. The language additions that were coming in at that time were also pretty abominable. I'm extremely sad for the loss of a viable cross-platform platform, but happy to be on to better things.
- and a really idiotic one.
I am a DevOps consultant and visit lots of places, and Java is the number one language for back end services. It is almost universal. Other languages are used for specialized things, such as Python for machine learning, because the ML community has embraced Python. For front end, Javascript is the most popular, but that will likely change as alternatives grow in popularity (e.g., Kotlin).
Also, Amazon has announced support for Java, as has IBM/Red Hat, so we are not dependent on Oracle.
The JVM ecosystem is enormously successful and robust. Languages like Scala and many others rely on it - not just Java.
I am not advocating for Java - just stating the reality that I see in my work. I don't much like any of the languages that are in use today.
I'm curious what you do for a living now that you are no longer a Java programmer? Paint houses? Plumber?
Is that Java was the 'correct' choice at the peak of the 'gold rush' around the turn of the century. This meant hordes of people without particular interest in programming going into the field because of money, and their total lack of interest carried showed in their work.
So to me Java transformed from a flawed implementation that was very slow and inefficient to an implementation that largely addressed the fundamental limitations but used by a bunch of people who are barely passable at programming.
Currently the language that has borne the brunt of the current 'gold rush' mentality has been Javascript, which explains in part why that ecosystem is pretty messed up.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
but I hate using Java based applications and avoid using them. I also dislike server Java applications that I am forced to support. Oh, and Oracle....everyone who doesnâ(TM)t make money based on an Oracle certification requiring job hates Oracle, there is always that. Android is the only product that relies on Java that I do not think sucks, but Android would be a better platform if the apps ran natively. Thus, I wish Java was dead but it is far from it.
How leading was the question in the headline?
> "Java programs still are 'the alien on your desktop'"
Desktop apps are *clearly* dead. Java one's never really were a thing for the last two decades (Minecraft being the breakout exception).
For android/ios space, Java is clearly an unpopular choice, which is odd, since it is supposed to be the most portable version, so you'd think it could have thrived in an era for "develop once", but alas, hardware isolation JVM seems to have hurt it rather than help it.
> JSP and Servlets are pretty much dead in favor of using a JavaScript front-end and a proper application back-end. JDBC will continue to hold java for a number of years
Java still seems to rule real-time backend application space. Just because HTML devs don't see it much any more doesn't mean it isn't there, and they are still very much teaching it at colleges in OO classes.
That's a little bit like asking "is Linux dead?"
Worse. It's like asking "How dead is Linux?" something that will give Slashdot gamma nazis a big stiffy since for once we actually have a real example of "Begging the Question".
But Java has been dying for years. Applets died a long time ago. JSP and Servlets are pretty much dead in favor of using a JavaScript front-end and a proper application back-end.
Servlets are long from dead.
JDBC will continue to hold java for a number of years
Ah, I see now. You really have no idea you're talking about. JDBC is an API Java applications use to talk to databases, so somehow it will keep Java going is strange....
I call Elastic Search from all of my C#/Node/Go microservices...
Erm. WHY?
XML was a flawed concept badly implemented shittest back when it should've been aborted and not only has it got no better since but the rest of the planet has adopted usable working alternatives that are superior in pretty much every single way.
XML is shit and I hold great suspicion towards the competence of anybody that promotes it.
I work on Linux products and we use OpenJDK as supplied by RedHat or Canonical when we need Java. Some of the developers run Windows for their dev environment. From what I've seen, there is really no (easy) alternative to Oracle Java JDK on windows.
It's nice to dev/test/use apps in multiple environments. It exposes bugs faster.
FWIW, we use .Net in Linux too!
There is about 20 offers for java developpers on the job board of my town. To write financials and logistics applications.
If I was in better form, I would apply. But I am sick.
Also, despite the existence of obviously saner alternatives like REST,
Uh....help me out here. Are you trying to say that REST is an alternative to Java, as though REST is a language? What does this even mean?
You hopefully know that REST is a protocol on how to handle HTTP requests and Java is a programming language, I literally program REST calls every second day.
Btw. Java is alive and kicking lately the combination of jars which embed a simple tomcat and serving rest calls from microservices with frontends written in Angular and React and everything being served from a containershas become quite popular (check spring-boot for kickstarting an embedded servlet runner combination, it really has taken off).
It is quite interesting to read Slashdots comments, most of the java is slow java is dead posters never really worked in corporate fields where java is more than alive and some of them are stuck with C++ for whatever reason.
I still would say servers are #1 with android being second. The client has moved to javascript mostly. Java is alive and very much so, but most users simply do not notice it anymore. Btw. I have seen more than one project moving away from node server side due to many reasons, performance being among one of the top of them. Java on the server side simply has hit the sweet spot between performance and implementation ease and it will soon become even faster. .Net is not used that often anymore for pure clients and Microsoft is moving away from .net as client dev framework as well.
Java on the client also is not slow anymore (computers have caught up, that was in the late 90s when it was dog slow), it is just not used that often anymore because clients usually nowadays are done completely different either as webapp or with some framework which simply embedds a browser or any other meta framework
Even
Everyone has moved to rest server side so has java. Servlets are alive and kicking they are just the base for the rest implementations on top of it.
Servlets are just not used directly anymore but they still are the base for everything which touches http on the server side.
(There are new spec revisions every 2-3 years adding new stuff), it just has moved to a place were nobody really directly touches it anymore.
JSP is legacy so is a load of other webframeworks.
The clients have moved to javascript, thats it, but that is true for any other language as well which served both client and server.
"Users have learned to avoid them and install 'real programs' instead..." Like Electron apps?
I never got on the Java train in the first place, python is where I live for initial versions, with followup sometimes in C if need be. Java is dead to me, but always was.
... I still program in C. Last I checked, JVM's were also written in C/C++.
It's fun to watch the kids in school realize they cannot get hired with Java skills. Even when we USE Java, we require you to program in C so we are sure you know how the computer actually works.
Top 5-10% always know. The rest come here on Slashdot and whine about being unemployable, it seems.
That is why you write Scala and Groovy ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
PHP is a far more dangerous language the Java, yet it is widely used and enjoys a good reputation. Java for all its safety has been maligned almost to oblivion ... This makes no sense.
Since you asked why... there are only a couple areas where I truly use XML. One is to write structured documentation in the Docbooks schema, normally in an editor like XMLMind. The other main area is the rendered (x)HTML for the browsers and XSL transformations to produce it. In this system, some data (such as the results from an SQL query) might be temporarily presented as XML when used as a source document for XSL -> xHTML rendering, if the command pipeline demands it.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
"Java programs still are 'the alien on your desktop'. They suck in many ways. Users have learned to avoid them and install 'real programs' instead..."
And which Java IDE is a real Program? I mean, which Java IDE is not mainly written in Java? Or which database client is not written in Java, like Squirrel? There are plenty of programs, which have no non Java competitor, e.g. "The Brain" or Protege.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I think the ratification of the final HTML 5.0 specification in October 2014 pretty much signaled the end of Java, Flash and Silverlight in terms of applications for web pages.
"The licensing scheme for Java kills it..."
OPEN JDK. How hard is that?
"Java programs still are 'the alien on your desktop'. They suck in many ways. Users have learned to avoid them and install 'real programs' instead..."
Apparently they have never heard of Java Native Packaging? With JavaFX you can skin your app any way you like with CSS. With the module system and jlink you can create small runtime packages. What's the problem?
It seems there's still a lot of misinformation out there from clowns with their 1990's view of Java.
I don't expect C# to do well either.
Based on what? The .NET Core ecosystem is thriving. Microsoft's has been firing on all cylinders with regular updates, constant speed improvements, and first-class support for Linux and containerized apps.
Maybe it's a geographic thing. Here in the midwest, I've never encountered a company that used Java; all the large corporations around here run their backend on .NET and are regularly hiring more C# developers.
You must not have heard, Java's not dead, over 3 BILLION DEVICES RUN JAVA!!! (Also, would you like to install the Ask.com toolbar?)
...it just smells funny.
Headline is simply begging the question./p.
If you really find yourself doing lots of unsigned arithmetic write a small class with methods add, sub etc.
No this will not incur the cost of calling the method. They will be in lined automatically.
Java 8 as unsinged.
But it would seem odd to be doing low level real time work in Java anyway. Much as I hate C, that is where it shines.
How can that be insightful? A buzzword rant ...
What has REST to do with Java? Same like iced orange juice versus a compressed gas engine car. Nothing. Or same like a wire for electricity with a iron pipe for water.
How can REST be saner than Java, when REST is a protocol principle and Java is a language? You "can do REST" in any language. You can program anything, e.g. REST, in Java.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Otherwise, it's all bollocks
You claim "Oracle hasn't really even tried to keep Java current, so now .NET beats Java like a piece of meat."
Where is you proof ? .net were touted to be Java killer since nearly 2 decades ! It is so dead, that clubs & conf are still there ! .net CLR has always been better at speed starup. So did the MS JVM. It you talk about the tons of overkilled synthatics sugar that C# is having and that make the code completely unreadable.... be aware got and read the list the JEPs to get a clue.
C# and
Did you tried to beat a piece of meat lately ? It only improves it taste and as well as gettin old ...
As we say : Java is the cobol of the 20xx, you can bet an whole career on it !
Where will C# be in 10 years ? Like Ruby ? Kotlin ? Go ? etc
Do you remember of MS DNA ? Where are those talented DCOM MVP gone as well ?
We used to do lot of C# for backend and mobile app (from 40% to 60% per year). Now, both have moved to either JavaScript or Java. .net is less thant 20% and no more new project but only maintenance.
Sure Java is not new, has lot of issues.... but they are known. See the mess that JavaScript is bringing to us : library bazard, dependency hell, unreadability, untestability, etc Sure there are lots of good reason (client side CPU rulez !), but there are lots of things we will pay the heavy price the next decade around JavaScript...
Java on the desktop has never really been very much "alive". Sure, there have been many, many Java apps on the desktop, but nowhere near as many as native apps. Plus, Java on web clients never took off the way Javascript and HTML5 have. But where Java has probably had its most influence is in corporations, on servers, and on Android phones. And since Oracle has so far successfully sued Google over Java on Android phones, that may be why people are turning against Java. Why even worry about problems with Oracle when someone can switch to a language which is more open, not controlled by a single overlord, and which is not subject to arbitrary changes later on (Sun had publicly supported Google before Oracle came and sued it)?
Don't 3 billion devices run on Java?
Bring in the flamethrowers
Some folks cannot stand the overdesigned, slow-as-molasses Java Crap. We like efficient and small software. We don't want to start a 400 MB process in 5s to run a 10 line program. 10ms and 200kb is enough for an efficient language.
Java is a tool for dumb&lazy people who aren't proper software engineers.
Let's polish the crapball of Java with a different-looking language on top. But still the waste and non-determinism of the JVM.
Anything which must be realtime, semi-realtime and/or efficient will be realised in C++, Ada, Pascal or the like.
Think of avionics, control units, signal processors, big data analysis tools, in memory databases, responsive desktop apps.
Java is the language of the hoardes of half-asses corporate drone programmers who use it to slow down monstrous server machines to a crawl.
And it never will.
It was always a badly broken outdated turd whose single and only purpose it was, to give Microsoft the ability to lie about cross-platform compatibility.
Full of crows, eagles, falcons, swans - all these pesky dinosaurs who did not get nuked by the Java meteorite and who are well alive and kicking.
We do not need your sodomist monkey civlization which you Java boys and Larry have set up.
C# is nevertheless a crap language just like the original, Java.
No destructors and non deterministic GC, which can make everything stop to a crawl in the worst possible moment.
Disciplined use of C++ still runs circles around these VM based toy languages. Just don't think you can learn it from some dummy books from Amazon. What you need is an experienced mentor who tells you what to do and what not to do.
Didn't the mainstream media tell us Mueller was the Good Guy on Hillary's side ? On the side of deadly, covert wars for GOOD ?
Now you tell us he is on Putin's side, he who sabotages Hillary's wars ?
Heretic ! Burn at stake !
As long as the Kremlin needs unhackable computers, OpenBSD will exist.
The world's #1 derivatives exchange runs on Linux and C++.
The suckers in London use C#. They had several daylong outages.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
The company I work for is getting rid of Java and Oracle in just one hit, this year!
I don’t understand the constant java bashing over the years.
Yes, java was unbearable slow in its first versions (like other interpreted languages like python, javascript) and less so the last years.
Yes, java is not a sexy language (aging APIs, verbose, limited functional concepts) but it tries to get better.
Yes, java applets sucked big times and they learned the lesson.
Yes, C# is inherently better because microsoft had the chance to see java’s big mistakes (checked exception, no properties, no reified generics) but java kind of maintained backwards compatibility since the first version.
Yes, Oracle licensing can be scary but OpenJDK is still free to use.
Where java shines a lot is at the server side with its best buddy linux (they both suffer the ‘desktop disgrace’). And the server-side is the place where nobody can see it, especially its detractors who never really used it (beside some bad-written desktop applications) and claim it’s used nowhere although it powers your banks, insurances, social security agencies and all those services behind your angular/react/vue front-ends.
Yeah, I will admin, I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole....
Minecraft bred a lot of script kiddies, and attracted a few java programmers. Unfortunately Notch never released his API for the modders, nor did he follow through and release his code open source like he promised. The original cadre of modders mostly left.
Microsoft is doing the normal things with it, a bunch of marketing to the educationmarket. Still no modding API, just some kind of scripting interface using Javascript!? Let's really confuse the potential programmers, make a Javascript scripting interface for a Java based game.
Anyway I don't know the status of Java in the world at large, but don't count on Minecraft to save the day.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
I'm not sure what is replacing Java, or if anything is.
For every 100 Java jobs in my area (RTP) there is 1 Kotlin job. So that's buzz jerky.
C# is my personal favorite language, but TIOBE says it's be trending down since 2012, although PyPL shows it doing somewhat better.
Node seems to get all the startup love, but I can't see large enterprises committing to it. Especially since TypeScript is such a food fight among developers.
SalesForce ?
From where I'm sitting, it's not even a little dead.
From my perspective, it never had any real place on the desktop or in the browser. But it had a place on the back-end of big internal enterprise applications (like, the stuff that makes sure peoples' insurance gets paid for by your employer). And, I still observe it having a place there.
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