print “Hello, world!”

to

public class HelloWorld {

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello, World”);
}

}

But to each his own.

When it comes to polyglot programming…

I work in a shop where the polyglot approach works (and has, for at least a decade). But it takes work! The company developed & maintains a framework to support this and it takes discpline from the lesser developers (such as myself) who make use of the framework. It also requires the architect to choose just a small handful of languages/technologies!

In defense of polyglot development I think the gains are more visible outside of immediate development. For us, this is in the support level. Support managers are far more comfortable patching one or two text files of Tcl (which can be diffed) than installing a mystery binary.

What’s exciting is that Java 7 may make this architecture very natural. Java has one of the richest set of proven libraries, so aside from technical issues (still waiting on that realtime garbage collector) and perception, it seems crazy to throw it all away and start over.

The only real weakness I see is rich-client support.

“Concurrency – seriously, let’s not go there. Take a look at TPL and PLINQ and Rx and _then_ tell me java’s concurrency support is OK. Seriously, it may be ‘good enough for some tasks’ but that’s not how I want it to be – I want it all.”
Give me an example of a task it’s not good enough for that the parallel extensions framework is? Yes, there are a limited few, but at present it’s good enough for 95% of tasks, not just “some”. Besides which, there’s extra concurrency stuff coming in in Java 7. I can’t think of anything sensible that won’t work with Java 7′s concurrency library.

“Despite great tools (IDEA), the language itself is as good as dead. And I wish I could say Scala is the solution, but compared to C# and F#, it just doesn’t cut it. Nice ideas, cleaner syntax, lots of sugar, but still not good enough.”
C#, in my mind, is a hugely overpushed and overrated cookie. Some things it does very well, but a lot of the things it supports that people are crying makes it better (operator overloading for instance) is stuff that Java deliberately took out because it’s generally a bad idea. Yes, of course I can tie things in to Windows better with C# than I can with Java, that will come naturally. But forgetting the libraries, there’s so many low level bad design choices that have been made in C# it’s just awful to use for some things in comparison to Java. Making all classes final by default completely undermines the whole idea of OO, the naming conventions are hideous (no-one ever started method names with a capital until C# came along, why the heck did they change that?) there’s some features that make development a lot easier like checked exceptions that they left out altogether, and despite what people say about mono it is truly *awful*. It’s design takes a language that’s tied in heavily to Windows and tries to bodge it to work on Linux, nothing more – and if anyone’s done a remotely complex project using it then they’ll know this!

With the likes of Android, Java is if anything more alive than ever. Google use a huge amount of Java for pretty much all their applications and they’re hardly going anywhere soon. Now that Oracle have hold of it they’ll probably be pushing it hugely on the enterprise market as well. And it’s still being updated to the point where we’ve already got Java 7 and 8 confirmed and on the way.

Java is not dead, nor will it be in the near future. Since its beginnings there have always been languages come up hailing that they’ll overtake it, but in reality that won’t happen until a language appears that does everything that Java does already, but better. With the support and the infrastructure behind Java already, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

Concurrency – seriously, let’s not go there. Take a look at TPL and PLINQ and Rx and _then_ tell me java’s concurrency support is OK. Seriously, it may be ‘good enough for some tasks’ but that’s not how I want it to be – I want it all.

And don’t get me wrong – I appreciate Java’s ecosystem and I think it has a future, but it’s no longer appealing for developers. Despite great tools (IDEA), the language itself is as good as dead. And I wish I could say Scala is the solution, but compared to C# and F#, it just doesn’t cut it. Nice ideas, cleaner syntax, lots of sugar, but still not good enough.

No offence (actually it is Java developers who should be offended by your post), but your comments about Java are a bit dated. Maybe it was true for JDK 1.0 but a lot of time passed and you should brush up your knowledge a bit before posting such strong statements. Please, do not disinform the fellow readers.

>I think it will be dead, because of the shitty VM and IL implementation (if someone looks under the hood – it’s a mess).
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/205088

>- Bad floating point support and so on.
http://download-llnw.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html

>- No language enhancements like in .NET like: anonymous methods, Lambda, LINQ etc.
LINQ analog:
http://source.mysema.com/display/querydsl/Querydsl
http://source.mysema.com/display/querydsl/Similar+frameworks
New features present in Java since JDK 5.0 (by the way, the date says 2004)
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/releases/j2se15/

- No good threading support like the parallel extensions in .NET.
Haven’t you heard of java.util.concurrent? Well, I did not see anything like it in other languages.
It is a rather high level concurrency library that allows you to write robust concurrent code.
http://www.javaconcurrencyinpractice.com/

>- And it’s only single language.
There are a lot of languages around JVM: Groovy, JRuby, etc.

>- Bad speed – that’s the worse.
Nonsense, huge enterprise web sites are written in Java. JIT compiler allows Java applications to run very fast.

Please, do not be offended. Let’s be friends=) I like C#, and honestly many features in Java 5.0 are a direct influene of C#
I just believe that you did not know the subject very well and there was no malicious intention from your side=)

with now powerful frameworks (Zend Framework, Symfony) and ORM components (Doctrine) it’ll be more and more useful.

I don’t see a lot of excitings websites for public which are not in PHP. why Drupal is the best CMS and not a Java ?
perhaps Java developpers were too much proud, didn’t look outside.

but the world moves, and it moves from public applications, like facebook social (in PHP, isn’t it ?)

I think if you compare with PHP framework, you’ll see : quick to develop and host, professionnal with fullobject (if you want), MVC and ORM datas, big opensource tools and components, solutions all you can imagine. and for a beta prototype very cheap with all PHP providers
what else ? :)

I don’t say PHP will be the java successor.
and like all you I’m a little sad the Java I liked didn’t move quickly the world
but PHP is now a big challenger in big projects like social and others topublic entreprises (like medias, content managment – all best content managements are PHP)
and the fact you don’t even think to it shows how developpers of “old big” languages don’t easy open to outside ;)

See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

But in your case, a rewrite might be the best (depends also on recruiting situation etc.)

Martin

Java has indeed better multi-OS and platform support, but that’s only virtual.

If i have five different C++ compilers/linkers for 5 different platforms i code quite as fast as with Java (STL, Boost) and have practically the same platform independence and much more speed. If it comes to the internet it’s more difficult, but not all apps nowadays are i-net apps.

.NET is the way to go in the future. The only place where Java has qualification (i can think of) is when it comes in JSPs with Tomcat. That’s unbeatable.

When i looked the last open positions here in Germany i saw more open once for .NET than for Java!

Cheers

I surf in Firefox with Java turned OFF and I don’t notice it. Java isn’t being used on the web client side anymore, thank god !

Surf with Java = OFF !

Isn’t tomcat and jetty java?

I think your quote about enterprise stuff being boring sum’s your view up – your not interested in shipping useful, valuable software, with perhaps more than a 5 minute life span – your interesting in playing with the technology for the technologies sake rather than what you can achieve with it – if you were more concerned with the end result then you may be less dismissive of Java.

When I see a resume with all the technologies under the Sun on there I see that as a danger sign of somebody who is more interested in playing than getting the job done.

but what don’t you talk about Php ?
I’m a java programmer, I go to zend framework and I find it very good to run web2.0 projects

I think php is the default choice for startups, and has most chances to become the next star : all the public excited projects are in php : CMS (drupal), ecommerce, multiblog…
it seems for me all the best opensource is in php.
too bad “old” developpers don’t think about it :)

—-
Searching for java is dead with Google, one gets

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

Dead indeed. Or at least lots of people think it is or will die 2009.

—-

Sorry, but that text:

java is dead

finds any documents with the words “java”, “is”, or “dead” in it, or any combination. I get about 15m results. No surprise – is and dead are VERY VERY common words.

What you most likely want is:

“java is dead”

or maybe:

+java +is +dead

ie, the WHOLE PHRASE, with quotes. I get about 170,000 results from the first, and 1.5m from the second (google UK). A lot, yes, but not 15m.

??

As a production language Java is not dead. The legacy code issue is enormous, and it’s not just big enterprises. I write programs in Java to use in my “real” job (biology), have been doing so since 1998, and I would probably need about 2 years to learn a new language and packages and rewrite everything. I don’t have 2 years for that, and it wouldn’t make sense in a cost/benefit sense anyway. I doubt I’m alone in this situation.

I think, in addition, Java will have a big role for open source systems. You need access to a huge public library for open source, and you need a language that’s very widely known. It’s tough to do open source when 97% of programmers can’t write in your language. Being propriety (C#) isn’t good either, both practically and philosophically.

I think Java will be fine in production until massive multiprocessing becomes routine. I recently wrote a system that can convert something that generates a series of items but can’t do next() conveniently into an iterator via multiprocessing. And it works great – except that the entire exceptions system is based around the assumption of a von Neumann system where if you throw an exception it gets caught by the calling code. When the calling code is in another thread it doesn’t work and the exception goes (inappropriately) to the top. Combined with the lack of list processing, I don’t think Java can work in a massively multiprocessed system. So in a decade or so Java will become defunct for new work although the legacy issue will remain for quite a while.

As for IDEs frameworks and “rapid” web development; I’ve had great successes with Tapestry 5, Jetty and Eclipse. You can edit the pages and reload the browser with restart and/or recompilation (eclipse of course is providing the incremental recompilation on save).

In the meantime, I think we are moving to a more polyglot universe. If you think about it, the ideas behind SOA (buy off Oracle) or REST (hooray!) are about enabling this sort of move by utilising standardised network transport layer protocols like HTTP and easily understood formats like JSON, HTML, XML etc. I think if you look at the “device enabled world” this becomes more apparent. I was just working on a project at a client that has a JBoss-enabled middle tier, with a quite large number of Windows CE devices “in the field” (ten of thousands) and a selection of .Net back office applications, all working happily together via web services.

Google around for most popular / most widely used programming language and all of the sites ive seen list java as #1. Here is one of them:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Far from dead. More along the lines of – ruling like a king.

One big thing I massively disagree with is that it was a huge mistake that java objects initial value is null. I think it is absolutely awesome. Exceptions are your friend. If something blows up – stack trace tells you exactly where the problem was. Fix it – good to go. Without exceptions you could spend hours to days trying to track down logic bugs.

Lets imagine that you wrote some complex math code and somewhere in there you forgot to initalize it (if you are using a good IDE it would flag it for you). You run the program – NPE. Stack trace tells you exactly where the problem is – fixed in less than a minute.

Now in a world Java world where all object had some non-null initial value: You run your code and oh… guess what? You didn’t get the output you expected. Or even worse you shipped it and then it causes major problems for the customer. Now you have to spend hours or possibly days trying to track down that damn logic bug.

No my friend, Java initializing objects to null is quite amazing and was a very intelligent design choice.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

So far, the music notation app I’m developing, using Java 2D and Swing, works flawlessly on Mac OS X and Windows XP with no platform-specific tweeks. Music playback is perfect on my ancient 867 MHz Mac!

I just dropped a massive Windows application onto a Linux/mono2.4 and it worked great. After doing a little testing I did change a couple lines of code. But the process was as smooth, if not smoother, than the equivalent process for a java application.

Also, I’d like to clarify that java is a valid option. It isn’t going away any time soon. I see no reason why both stacks can’t co-exist. When you combine mono,SWIG, and IKVM, you have a great framework for using java,C#, and C++.

I still believe you need Java on your CV to be able to chose your job. At least if you live outside the valley.

“I read a lot about Scala including a lot of things still not supported in IDEs and so on. ”

IDE support (Eclipse, Netbeans, IDEA) is still subpar. Especially error checking and auto completion – and today I shouted at IDEA because it doesn’t understand Scala imports properly. But for me the benefits of smaller code outweight the Scala cons.

As a head of development though the largest hurdle for introducting Scala is the subpar IDE support.

Look at history – COBOL and VB were hugely popular despite the existence of many better languages.

Corporations aren’t simply going to switch over their applications to a new language or platform just because it is better or even more popular; there is a huge investment in these legacy systems and it is almost always be cheaper and less risky to maintain them than to replace them with something written from scratch. It’s not just the initial investment in creating the software; it’s the infrastructure, support organizations, and procedures processes that exist around the software. These things do not just go away overnight. There are many companies out there running software on JDK 1.4 or earlier, despite the relative ease in switching to a newer JDK vs. switching to a whole new language or platform.

Ruby/Groovy/JRuby and Scala are all pulling in the young, trendy folks who don’t have years of experience invested in Java on their resume.

C#, while having a solid crowd of hardcore windows platform devs is also heavily crowded with older VB programmers, who again, have a lot of time invested in “where they are” (read: Microsoft-teet-suckling). Unfortunately, that means a huge bunch of these peeps may be getting a lot of work done, but they can do it without really understanding OO. Look at the failure of webforms compared to the MVC model that’s come out somewhat recently.

Java on the other hand is still staffed to the gills with people who know what they’re doing because most of the frameworks are so wordy and over-thought that you have to know something about OO and patterns. I would argue that your Java guys tend to be a bit mightier in the CS background. So while the language is about cemented in stone and not very sexy in that regard, the community is still bringing plenty of good stuff.

I personally like the polyglot approach. Some languages like Ruby (with Rails specifically) are essentially domain specific and as such, you’re going to get a lot more bang right out of the gate. So why not use IronRuby or JRuby (or hell, just Ruby) for your web stuff, but use JavaFx or WCF+C# for your rich client.

Meanwhile, with web service contracts and other hooks, you can still share certain core functionality. Hell, you might even have some of that implemented in C for speed’s sake.

Use the right tool for the job instead of suffering vs a nail with yr tape measure. The polyglot approach also let’s you keep yr old timers rocking what they know and yr young turks happy with their shiny toys.

I did pretty intensive analysis about what should be my future in development and decided to go with Java.

Language features or verbosity is just one point. It also must be readable, easily learnable by the people coming after us, there must be libraries, good IDE, GUI designers etc.

I do quite each month read about a new programming language – today it was “Surinx” – see http://blog.headius.com/2009/08/introducing-surinx.html

I read a lot about Scala including a lot of things still not supported in IDEs and so on. I think, people try to reinvent the wheel again and again even without understanding why several older things have been implemented as they have been implemented.

I go totally conform with all the developers designing the Java language who think very well before implementing something new. It should not happen that such an important thing as the Java language become bloated and unstable. – Nobody thinks about C(++) introducing significant language changes.

I do software development since the early eightees and I have seen a lot coming along. Java is not dead, it’s just some “hypies” talking about it’s dead – nothing more! In my opinion talking about Java dying is just a hype.

The fact that we do not have C# on the JVM is down to politics and religion, I mean you have every other arcane little language there. And over on the other side, Mono runs Java very well.

I am not saying C# is going to have to take Java’s place on the JVM, I’m saying that you’re leaving out an important piece of the puzzle in your list. Fan for instance (which happens to be my favorite) is heavily influenced by C#.

This was/is one of the major features of Java Sun got right in the past.

When Java started, it was REALLY ambitious. From enterprise servers to credit cards, everything should run Java. That era is over, and a sober attitude has settled, which I think is good.

The question could also be formulated; “Is the Java hype dead?”, and to that I think most people would answer “Yes”. It is no longer the sexiest thing you can work with, and it is these fashion programmers that are very vocal on their proclamation that Java is dead or that the language needs an overhaul.

I personally don’t think Java needs much overhaul (some, yes), but instead the many “wisdoms” and “patterns” that we are coding with are just plain wrong and greatly contributes to the “noise”, and this *could* be fixed within Java without the massive investment of a new programming language.

The investment side of Java is greatly under-estimated by the fashion programmers. The amount and quality of tooling, libraries and most importantly knowledge among the developers are immense, something that will take decade to replace. That alone should raise the question “Why?” and one should (as was the case of C++ to Java transition) look for evolutionary small steps and not massive replacement. Re-writes (so to speak) don’t pay off unless the benefits are 1-2 magnitudes greater, which none of the contenders can show at the moment (except for prototypes and smaller projects where maintenance crew equal one guy’s head).

What is your beef with Mono, is there something you tried to do with it and failed? What are your concerns?

I don’t a great deal of personal experience, but it is part of Gnome with two application written with it, and seems well supported and reasonably robust.

I tried writing a small application with it, and found C# a mostly improved Java.

If the job of tooling is to allow developers to efficient create applications, then Ruby has better tooling that Java. Just write the same application with Rails and SpringMVC and see how long each one takes.

Deploy an application with Java on an enterprise Java application server, and do the same with PHP.

No language ever dies. Saying that Java is dead is like saying C died. Newer languages are replacing Java but it doesn’t mean that it is a “semicolon” for Java. What about Pascal ???

And JVM is surely not dead and will not die soon unless until someone would develop a platform good enough to replace JVM everywhere.

The chance of Java dieing is the same chance C has of dying.

And that is something else altogether. While C still has a huge place, C++ and Objective C have eroded its space much faster than I’d have believed. Still, it won’t cease to be important to a lot of people, as the same applies to Java.

But one can ask a completely different question, which people will often equate with “Is Java dying?”. That question is:

Is Java losing its proeminence?

I won’t answer that question directly. I’ll point, instead, to something Paul Graham (I think) once mentioned. First, people identify themselves with groups, institutions, beliefs, etc. By “identify” I mean the people will see attacks on these things as personal attacks.

Second, as long as these things are secure in their position, attacks against them are ignored as being silly.

Third, when an institution/belief/etc is being seriously threatened, then people react. And react precisely as one would expect people to react to a personal attack: impulsively, irrationally (as in, without pausing to consider pros and cons), and with force out of proportion. For example, see the inquisition — which only went all-out at a time when the Church was really being threatened.

Fourth, read the replies to your blog.

“[...] since Java became the thing, any language that was not OO was considered inferior.”

This is highly subjective but: I’m not convinced that modeling large business domains and talking to business users is productive in functional languages. And I know it doesn’t work with procedural ones.

“[...] much of the boiler plate code”

Today there isn’t much boilder code in Java – for example see Adam Bien.

http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/ejb_3_1_and_rest

But it’s still noisier than many other languages.

I don’t think the JVM is dead.

Interesting commentary on the state of Java. I agree with many of your points and find the article to be a pretty balanced assessment on the state of Java. I do think you should have included Flex/Flash in the list of potential successors. I know it is not as popular with the JVM crowd as say JRuby, Scala, etc. but Flex is a solid way to develop both web and desktop applications. Especially if you put something like Java behind it. I particularly found the point about Java being an OO-only (Object Oriented) language interesting. Especially since it seems that since Java became the thing, any language that was not OO was considered inferior. However, there is a place for OO and there is a place for procedural coding. Not everything needs to be an object.

I believe Java as a language will be around for while, but I think that Sun really missed the boat when they made the web development process as complex as they did. I’m sure Java purist will point out the IDEs and all the different tools they have to help write much of the boiler plate code and speed up the process. But ultimately why should the process be some complex in the first place?

IMHO, Java still has a place as an enterprise application language or back-end language for someone looking to add strength to apps that require very heavy lifting behind the scenes may utilize Java, but I think that as the new languages evolve this issue will go away to the degree that Java may eventually become looked at as COBOL is looked at today, a useful language in some instances, but not what you start up a site on today.

point remains, when you narrow the query to “java is dead” or “is java dead” you get far fewer results than just searching for articles that contain the words “java” “is” and “dead” as opposed to the phrase.

As for developer inertia, I run in to an awful lot of blub when I talk about Scala.

Typo here: “the early lock and synchronize system of Java proofed to be too difficult”

proofed -> proved.

for example, java has tons of mature middleware that can be certified in big corporate project.
rails does not, it has the bare minimum.

but rails allows to build medium size project an order of magnitude faster than java big guns.

there is no magic, you can drive faster with a small mini car in a city and you can carry more with a 16 wheeler.

i prefer several tools for different jobs.

Interestingly enough, this is linked from Scala’s site (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/960).

as Ricky suggested, C# should have been there – in my opinion. You are right when you say that the two are very different in terms of background philosophy/culture (open source vs. proprietary). However, both languages have very similar syntax (a Java coder can learn C# VERY fast) while the C# technology is much more innovative than what happens in the Java space right now, I think.

I am working with both on a regular basis for now almost 2 years. To put it short, both have features/weaknesses (Eclipse rocks, Visual Studio sucks, ASP.NET rocks, JSF sucks) and share most of the “enterprise application development” space, I think.

It is true that someone that is used to Java & open-source technologies (Linux, BSD, Apache, etc) will most likely not switch to super-proprietary Windows/IIS/.NET combo. But, as a programmer, I like to think that someone mastering both technologies won’t be afraid to choose a technology for its qualities rather than because he thinks “the other choice” sucks, without knowing much about it.

That being said, Java is definitely not dead. The innovation just won’t come from Sun or the JCP I think. They moving too slow, so third parties are taking over. Check out what SpringSource is doing, nice innovation. And, on the other side of the fence, Microsoft labs are developing .NET technologies very fast (compared to Java, that is).

Just my 2 cents :-).

Its goals, not it’s goals.

No-one would mistake a Google query for scientific research.

Is Java the language dead ? It will find a space for itself wherein it will continue to be strong and may even be irreplacable. However this space is unlikely to be the application programming space which currently occupies the market share of a lot of development activities and developers. What is clearly apparent is that it is losing mindshare fast, and consequently it could lose some amount of marketshare as well. However even if that were to happen, it would require a significant amount of time since it is far easier to change a technology than the installed base of developers competent with such a technology.

FWIW I had written a post on a similar topic (but covering some very different points) a year back Java : the perpetually undead language.

at the end of the day, i would say know. most of my friends are java coders and they work in the financial sector, which is heavily dependant on enterprise java. if money makes the world go round it will make sure that it keeps making java go around.

Do you have any citations to support this? All the statistics I could find about programming language usage/popularity clearly and dramatically indicate that PHP has been the default choice, not Ruby. It’s not even close.

When searching google for phrases like this, please add quotes: “Java is dead” actually only has 172.000 hits.

-m

Java is dead in an innovation sense, Sun has made that very obvious and plan to make $ on JavaFX instead. So while Java certainly is not going anywhere… it’s also not going anywhere!

While last.fm is a little older (founded 2002) both are huge and are profitable. If that seems too old, consider that LinkedIn was launched in May 2003.

I can only speculate about the reasons, but would assume: 1.) Not too different (yes some more nice language features, but not enough to switch) 2.) Only a little less noisy 3.) Far fewer open source libraries and tools 4.) Constrained deployment options. I think most OPS are not very happy with Windows as a platform and consider Mono on Linux as unproven – far worse in any case than Java/Tomcat/Linux.

Do you have different experiences about people migrating to C#? For what reasons?

Why can’t we all just get along? I don’t like Ruby but I don’t write blogs about how Ruby is so 2006 or that it has been forgotten now that Scala and other shiny new languages have emerged. I have lost a lot of respect for Ruby programmers because they are so completely hostile towards Java and anyone who doesn’t like Ruby.

The next language I’m going to learn is JavaFX Script.