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."
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?
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
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...
No. Oracle killed Java.
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.
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.
Between it's different versions, the security problems this brings, etc., it's dying fast in the professional environment
What security problems come with Java?
I don't see a lot of JSP servers, either
JSP is legacy now, but a lot of companies are using Java on the backend in a web services model. The frontend can be in Angular, or React, or whatever. It's a good choice when you want stable, cheap developers.
As my own professional opinion, I would say that Java is better for writing backend APIs than Node/Express.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
[quote]“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” - Bjarne Stroustrup[/quote]
Outside of enterprise, there's only 3 big sources of Java these days: Android development (which is trying to move away from Java), Minecraft (ditto) and Steam games (very few games use a JRE, but the most recent and bigger example is Slay the Spire).
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.
Not sure why there's comments of licensing issues... it's a free download from Oracle's website
Well the issue is complex if you stick to Oracle provided binaries, the TL;DR simple answer is to move on to OpenJDK and be done with it.
Java SE 8 which was the last version you could "freely" use in a commercial product, if you go to Oracle's website at the moment, you'll get this message.
Oracle will not post further updates of Java SE 8 to its public download sites for commercial use after January 2019. Customers who need continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 8 or previous versions can get long term support through Oracle Java SE Subscription or Oracle Java SE Desktop Subscription. For more information, and details on how to receive longer term support for Oracle JDK 8, please see the Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap.
Going forward you now have two options. Oracle OpenJDK which is an open source JDK that you may use as you see fit, the end. Oracle JDK, which starting at version 11 is Oracle OpenJDK plus some Oracle enhancements. You may freely download Oracle JDK and use it for development and testing, however, Oracle JDK cannot be used for production or commercial use without being anally raped by Oracle, so yeah you cannot download Oracle JDK and just use it without being in some degree of violation of Larry Ellison's 37th yacht fund somewhere in the fine print of that download. Additionally, Oracle has gotten a little blood thirsty lately so use Oracle JDK without a license at your own damn risk.
So you might ask, so if we have OpenJDK, who would want Oracle JDK? The important thing to remember that OpenJDK provided by Oracle is Oracle's build of OpenJDK, which may or may not have all the most recent patches. Basically, Oracle's OpenJDK is on par patch wise the day a new version hits with Oracle JDK. So when Java 11 hit, that day Oracle JDK and Oracle OpenJDK were functionally the same. However any patches that Oracle JDK has received since that day, Oracle OpenJDK hasn't or might have, it's basically "meh we patch it when we patch it." However, Oracle isn't the only game in the OpenJDK build world.
Here's a post about all the different folks building OpenJDK. I suggest OpenJDK from AdpotOpenJDK or if you are using Linux, BSD, Unix, etc Just use the OpenJDK that your vendor provides, they usually keep it reasonably up to date. What the change does do, is make everyone change their old habit of just going to Oracle's site, download their JDK, and go from there. Instead, just go grab a non-Oracle build, beside we shouldn't be frequenting Oracle anyway.
Outside of that, Java is still Java and unsurprisingly Oracle is still shooting themselves in the foot. The most recent move with Java 9, 10, and 11 only further cements folks' decisions to leave Oracle as their provider of a Java implementation.
Nah, C# is a no-go. It's only useful as long as you don't care about any platforms beyond Microsoft Windows. That means C# may have killed Borland C++ Builder, but it did pretty much nothing to Java.
Oracle killed Java. Suing Google over their use of Java in Android was an absurdly stupid move. Android was THE one mainstream platform where Java was finally a first class app. Way to go alienating your user base Oracle.
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.)
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.
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.
Has anyone ever heard of it before the post on Slashdot? Its not like this was Tiobe whom we've seen around forever.
I'm sorry, are you unaware of .Net Core?
Available on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Available on x86 and ARM.
Free to use.
Free to change.
Get and fork it top to bottom on GitHub with a open source standard permissive license.
Or are you still stuck in the days of "hate MS at any cost"?
I work for a company that uses .Net Core for all its software development. We dev on Macs, deploy on Linux in Docker containers, and pay Microsoft *nothing*. We are the largest travel company in the Southern Hemisphere, and we have partnerships with the largest RV manufacturers in the world.
But don't mind us, we are just proof that your beliefs are out of date.
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.
If you poke something, it must be BASIC.
Why is Snark Required?
Well la-tee-da for you. You're constricted to staying within .NET v2.0 Core-only for as long as you wish to maintain cross-platform compatibility. Somehow you're happy about that? Someday, you'll own the fact that you are in a dead end platform that is going nowhere, by design. Your only way up will be to drop cross-platform compatibility so that you can use .NET proper. And Microsoft will be smiling evilly all the way to bank when that day arrives. Good luck, have fun with that.
Every platform is eventually a dead end platform.
.NET Core allows you to bundle the runtime with your application so that limitation no longer exists. With .NET Core 3, .NET Core will be ready to replace .NET Framework so anyone should be able to take advantage of that capability if they want to.
Oh, and .NET Framework is built into the OS... so you usually do not need to install a runtime anyway except for 2.x/3.x which are disabled by default in modern Windows.
I'd say it's fast zombie, as opposed to slow. Possibly infected with rage after a bite from Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Node may be okay for small services, but if you are working on anything more than "small" then you want something like Java or C#.
Java is great these days for that kind of thing. Lots of documentation, tons of useful libraries, the old saying of "write once debug everywhere" doesn't seem to hold anymore. It just works, it works well, and it's fast. Not like the old days.
Node fanboys baffle me. We spent decades explaining the value of strict types, for example, and now they want to throw it all out the window... Yes, you CAN write complex software with JavaScript but dear god why the hell would you want to?
wait, what year is this? .NET & C# _are_ cross-platform _and_ open source.
https://github.com/dotnet
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that version 11 Oracle OpenJDK will have exactly the same patches applied as Oracle JDK (LTS), until version 12 comes out. Then the patches Oracle applies to Oracle JDK version 11 will not be applied to Oracle OpenJDK version 11. Oracle OpenJDK users will be expected to move to version 12. (This in turn will receive official Oracle patches until version 13 comes out, and so on. New versions are expected to come out every six months from now on.)
However, I believe some other JDK suppliers, like AdoptOpenJDK, will provide provide a patched version of version 11 even after version 12 is out.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
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.
At a job interview a few weeks back (embedded), they showed me another team's product--cross platform app development for ios/android/pc/mac and it was all C# with Xamarin. If it's sufficiently cross-platform for companies to use for their products, it's probably not that limited.
You really have no clue what you are talking about. The var keyword has nothing to do with the underlying CLI. It is a language feature that the compiler can pick up on to determine the correct type at compile time. The generated bytecode is still statically typed. The var keyword helps greatly in refactoring.
Literally everything that you said in that post is wrong. In terms of being very similar to Java, here are a few differences:
As to the var thing, this is simple type inference. It is roughly analogous to C++11's auto. It's nothing to do with Visual Basic, it's more important for things like LINQ, where you end up with complex types that depend on the value of an expression and you don't want to force the programmer to write them explicitly. In these cases, var lets you bind variables to values of anonymous types. The code is still strongly statically typed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
- 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.
You don't know what you're talking about. The var keyword simply saves you having to specify the type on the left side of the initial assignment statement. You always know exactly what the type of any variable is as it is explicitly stated on the right hand side of the assignment. This is a massive readability win when the type name is more than a few characters. Additionally, VB.NET is strongly typed.
I do not have a signature
Literally everything that you said in that post is wrong. In terms of being very similar to Java, here are a few differences:
C# has signed and unsigned primitive types (Java has only signed)
char is an unsigned integer primitive in Java, range 0 to 65535