The State of Java

by mgrouchy • 17 years ago

26 45 17 years ago

mgrouchy• 17 years ago

To comment on this, Its not that I don't think Java should probably die, but I don't think Java is going anywhere any time soon. As long as IBM uses Java as one of their core technologies and is writing their own JVM then Java will definitely be around for awhile.

teppefall• 17 years ago

Goole uses C++ and Java while people focus on the static help system written in Python.

So.. if you want to build a static help system...

tsally• 17 years ago

Results 1 – 10 of about 8,620,000 for java is dead. Dead indeed.

Results 1 - 10 of about 22,200,000 for obama is a muslim. Muslim indeed.

On a more serious note, the JVM is a platform that enterprise has a lot of experience deploying and securing. As the author admits, the JVM doesn't need Clojure or anything else to save it; it's entrenched in enterprise. This, combined with the fact that even COBOL isn't dead yet, makes me think that Java has a long way to go. Languages never die because there are better ones out there. It's certainly not trendy, but companies are going to need Java programmers for a helluva long time.

ionfish• 17 years ago

Results 1 - 10 of about 936 for "java is dead".

Changes quite a bit if you quote it, leaving out pages with headlines like "Dozens dead in Java quake." People should think a bit more carefully before referencing numbers like these.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

BTW, has anyone tried to port COBOL to the JVM? Sounds like an viable idea for a startup.

edit: it seems a company called Veryant already did it (http://www.veryant.com/products/)

mahmud• 17 years ago

Product shops should be evaluated under a different light than service shops. Their existence shouldn't dissuade you from looking into the market; sometimes companies are stagnant ghost-ships that haven't done anything for ages. Other times they're an incompetent bunch with outsourced workers for a development team. In yet others, a product company only caters to one big client or two, or is geographically focused in one area.

If you don't see their name in industry publications and trade conferences they're as good as dead. Google their products and see if anybody is looking for help with them online. If they have a small user community, you can get a feel for how well they're doing. If there is no visible user community, well, there is either no market or the "company" is just a brochure website for vaporware.

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

There's also the NACA project: http://code.google.com/p/naca/

A European company's IT staff built it over a period of several years, and it looks like a fairly impressive bit of engineering: http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2009/06/naca-presented-jazoon...

va_coder• 17 years ago

Is Java dead? No

Will controversial headlines often get undeserved interest? Yes

junklight• 17 years ago

Its even worse than a controversial headline. Its lazy blogging/reporting.

In the actual world things don't have to die for new things to appear. In the world of blogs and newspapers - each product must slay the ones that have gone before: "will this product replace all iphone sales?" - and then of course "product fails because all iphone owners didn't sell them and buy the new product".

I guess for programming languages there is also some one up-manship - "I'm better than all you people over there because my language of choice is still alive".

I could perhaps understand the articles point a little if Java had just stopped being flavour of the month - but it stopped being that years ago. It might not be the "sexy" choice but there is a huge amount of the worlds IT infrastructure running on Java and I don't reckon that's going to stop any time soon.

bcl• 17 years ago

Absolutely. Java is clearly not dead, and will likely never be 'dead'. It is clear that it has been integrated into the Enterprise and is in use for many long term projects. This ensures that there will be a need to at least maintain Java codebases for many years.

Java is being used to teach programming in many schools, so there are a large number of newbie developers walking around with a single hammer in their toolbox. They are going to be using it for any new project that they are tasked with.

And in general I think languages never really die. Look at COBOL, ADA and Perl (wink).

Tamerlin• 17 years ago

It's not just the newbies that limit themselves to the Java hammer, a lot of folks who've been in the industry for some time have grown comfortable with Java and are too set in their ways to change. In some cases, they're so set in their ways that they won't even migrate to newer Java tools that would automate a lot of what they currently do by hand, even though on time-constrained projects where we could have saved a considerable amount of time by taking advantage of faster development methods (it took 30 minutes to build and deploy a functioning web service in C# and 4 days to get the same thing working (but without the DB connection) in Java).

We went with the Java version... what we could have done in one week has now taken up around two months.

axod2• 17 years ago

This sums up what is wrong with this industry.

Quit the endless "This is hot! This is dead! We're reinventing X by taking all the features out!"

We're not the fashion industry here, we're software developers.

How can a language even die? Sure, the community could die off, there could be no new updates, but that doesn't mean death.

ilyak• 17 years ago

If java is dead, what is alive?

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

I tend to agree with the comments about intentionally controversial headlines, but the article itself was excellent. If you haven't actually read it, please take the time to do so.

I think in the end, the author really nailed it. The important question is, "Is Java dead for me?" I would not use Java for a new personal project (and probably not for a work project either unless the libraries were needed). I do not have a clear replacement in mind... Python stands out the most.

My biggest problems with Java are the compilation step (admittedly not that big a deal with an IDE, but I don't always like to use an IDE), the insistence on objects, and most importantly, the lack of first class functions.

A new issue that has come up for me in comparison to Python is constructor overloading. In Python, constructor overloading is beautiful because of args and kwargs. In any C-family language (including Java here), it's horrible. With small objects where inheritance works well, the constructors in other languages can get unwieldy fast. In Python, they're always concise. I also love keyword arguments in general. It can make code much more readable, especially when using something like wxPython, where the parameter lists are long and otherwise would be quite vague.

axod2• 17 years ago

That's not being 'dead' though. That's just choosing the right tool for the job at hand.

It's like proclaiming conventional spanners dead now that you can get adjustable spanners.

Some jobs you want solid object based exception handling water tight programming, and other jobs you want loose runtime based functional stuff.

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

"The important question is, "Is Java dead for me?" "

Great Point,

"Is Java dead for me?" (and why or why not) would be an interesting question to ask HN regulars, vs the stupidity of trying to decide whether Java is "dead" or "alive" in general. The former leads a personal statement of intent, and consequently there is no real argument about any answer. The latter is undecideable and leads to plenty of unproductive argument.

As for me, I just transferred the leadership of an Open Source Java library I maintain to someone else, primarily because I am sick of writing and maintaining Java. That said, it is just a personal decision and I can imagine many scenarios where Java (not just the JVM) use would be appropriate. I just hope I am never part of those situations again! :-)

Personally, when I need to build something on the JVM I'll use Scala or Clojure. Else, I'll use Haskell, Python or C as appropriate.

Touch Wood.

prewett2• 17 years ago

I've been wondering about this: for personal projects, Python is compelling. But when you start working with multiple developers, the lack of compile time type checking seems like it would lead to a lot of subtle runtime errors. How do multi-person Python projects deal with this?

steveklabnik2• 17 years ago

I'm a Rubyist, not a Pythonista, but the same principles apply. I love really really strongly/statically typed languages (Haskell) and really really weakly/dynamically typed languages (Ruby).

Generally, it's not a problem. I have a hard time articlating why, exactly... I guess my code just tends to be short, sweet, and to the point. It's very rare that when I code in C, for example, that I try to do something that the type system wouldn't allow anyway.

That's a terrible answer, my apologies. Maybe this would be better: could you provide an example of a situation where you feel that dynamic code would cause a problem?

Mabye a bit of back and forth will help me figure out what I'm trying to say.

dasil003• 17 years ago

This tends not to be a significant problem--if you pass the wrong type you find out the first time you run the code, which is probably not any later than you would have compiled it. A much more common problem are null references, but Java doesn't do anything about those either.

Java is great for the enterprise because it's stable, mature, and doesn't leave any room for cleverness to fly over people's heads. However the compile-time checks don't do much to prevent difficult-to-debug errors. A more powerful type system like Haskell is much more interesting in this regard.

abalashov• 17 years ago

I think Java is sufficiently lodged in the annals of the enterprise world that there's no danger of it dying any time soon.

I'm in telecom, and can tell you that Java has completely colonised this space for OSS/BSS (operational support/billing support systems), phone switch EMSs (external management systems), large-scale user portals and provisioning (Broadsoft), etc.

It ain't going anywhere.

known2• 17 years ago

I think Web Browser is a good alternative to JVM and CLR platforms.

gthank• 17 years ago

And how exactly do you expect to generate the content for that web browser?

known2• 17 years ago

how do you generate content for jvm and clr?

brazzy• 17 years ago

Java's not fashionable. I guess to a lot of people that's the same as dead. These people will eventually grow out of this view.

mosburger• 17 years ago

I rolled my eyes at the headline, thinking it was clearly cashing in on the Java deathwatch and a controversial headline. But this is one of the more sane articles on the topic that I've ever read. It's not just a fanboy of some other "trendy" language pointing out Java's shortcomings.

neovive• 17 years ago

With strong support from companies like Oracle and IBM, Java code will likely be around as long as COBOL. Java may not make sense for small companies and startups building webapps. However, it works extremely well for big companies with large tech budgets, many developers and that only run software with support contracts and SLA's.

jlgosse• 17 years ago

You have to realize that Java isn't just important for the enterprise. It's also really important for academia and mobile.

I remember seeing a figure which was in the billions, which basically represented the number of non-pc devices reliant on Java, and that number was comprised mostly of mobile devices.

On top of that, most schools around the world begin teaching their computing undergrads in Java, which is a pretty big deal in terms of where development is headed in the mainstream.

alrex021• 17 years ago

The noise level just went up.

This is maybe a lesson for me to spend less time reading HN from now on. Perhaps leave the reading for the evenings as entertainment. :)

Nelson69• 17 years ago

There needs to be like a deficit score for any article that contains "is dead" in the title or "considered harmful"

Just off hand, can anyone think of a company that legitimately could have succeeded but failed because they chose the wrong programming language? Like they had a really really great idea and they had a really good design but the language just got in the way?

mey• 17 years ago

No, FreeBSD is dead

jganetsk• 17 years ago

OCaml and Factor are interesting and capable, but too far away from the procedural mainstream that is the C legacy.

Statements like this are patently absurd. OCaml is definitely close enough to the "procedural mainstream".

wlievens2• 17 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but I'd love an answer here. Is there any language at all, outside of the .NET stack, that has the kind of tools support java has? I'm talking about IDE with automatic refactoring, a wealth of plugins, instant squiggly-line syntax checking, source crossreferencing of libraries, etc? The only reason I use Java is Eclipse. I'd love to see another language that addresses Java's deficiencies but still has the same tool integration as Java. And I don't want to go over to the .NET side, sorry.

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

"I'm talking about IDE with automatic refactoring, a wealth of plugins, instant squiggly-line syntax checking, source crossreferencing of libraries, etc? The only reason I use Java is Eclipse."

wlievens, given those requirements, Java is a good choice (and I say this as someone who just gave up on java completely) and there isn't yet a feasible alternative langauge with that level of tool support afaik.

wlievens2• 17 years ago

I figured. I'm just often looking for a justification of why I'm using a sometimes crippled language, but it always turns out my productivity and the quality of my code is higher when using Eclipse/Java.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

Isn't Scala like Java++? Aren't both primarily aimed at enterprise server-side stuff? Any experienced Java programmers who have coded in Scala care to share their thoughts?

dschobel• 17 years ago

It's disconcerting how many people are objecting simply on the premise of the article without actually talking about the content (which is quite good).

Headline writers take note.

moe• 17 years ago

As long as idiotic articles asking that question are posted: Probably not.

wayne• 17 years ago

> The only large – and lets say profitable and growing – startup that uses Java is LinkedIn.

Mint uses Java a ton too and they did ok: http://mint.jobscore.com/jobs/mint/javasoftwareengineerbacke...

ramoq2• 17 years ago

Not to mention Yodle (nyc). They have a strong dev team.

ramoq2• 17 years ago

Honestly, if it wasn't for spring and jpa/hibernate I wouldn't be too interested in java. Spring has _really_ made a great impact on java and people have noticed.

matunos3• 17 years ago

Rumors of Java's death are greatly exaggerated. I can tell you that the article has failed to mention some other major companies that are using Java and are (believe it or not!) bigger than LinkedIn and Twitter.

Anyways, since when did googling for "X is dead" mean anything? I just googled for "Obama is dead" and got 111,000,000 hits. I guess that makes Obama 13 times more dead than Java. Somebody get me a copy-editor.

I'll give the author some points: the discussion that followed the ridiculous intro was a somewhat interesting, if dissembling, defense of Java. In the end though, it's all just some private pondering.

Java's death won't come at the declaration of some enterprising young turks who like Ruby (hey, I like Ruby too) battling it out over mailing lists and blogs. Programming languages, like old soldiers, don't die; they fade away... and very slowly.

The State of Java

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