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>Java (and by that I mean mostly the JVM) were designed after careful analysis of market needs. This kind of analysis is only available to certain players I ca

>Java (and by that I mean mostly the JVM) were designed after careful analysis of market needs. This kind of analysis is only available to certain players I can't detect even the slightest influence of careful analysis on the rise and fall of technologies. If the creators of Java were planning anything, then it certainly wasn't what actually happened. Java failed completely in all areas it was originally built for (at least until Android, which happened very late in the game and is under threat). If I had to come up with a formula for success, it would look something like this: 10% novelty-seeking and merit + 10% corporate backing and tenacity of the creators + 10% platform advantage + 70% historical accident. In Java's history, that 70% historical accident was the web. No one planned for that to happen. All careful planners were taken completely off guard by the web. Looking at my formula, I would say Swift has a shot at going somewhere. But there are huge wildcards like WebAssembly, the future of Java on Android and of course all the unknown unknowns that are probably going to disrupt all careful analysis including mine.

pron 10y ago
> But there are huge wildcards like WebAssembly, the future of Java on Android and of course all the unknown unknowns that are probably going to disrupt all careful analysis including mine. With that I can completely agree. I can't predict when and how the demise of the JVM would come about, but I can see that it's not happening just yet. I do wonder about one meta-question, though: What effect does the trendy SV tech-marketing-speech has on developer technologies? Ruby was a huge SV hit and now it's ebbing, all without ever leaving a big impact on the software industry at large (sure, it was adopted by the odd "enterprise", but nothing on a grand scale). Now we see something similar (on a smaller scale, I think) with Haskell, Go and Elixir. Will there be a serious impact, or is it a passing SV fashion?
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  I don't know, but one thing is for sure. All dominant technologies that turned out to have a great impact once started out as something that many thought was a passing fad. Also, there are some languages that dominate significant niches seemingly forever, like Python as a frontend for math, science and machine learning or R for statistics. It's very sticky even though I never quite understood why you would want such a huge language barrier between those who implement interesting algorithms in C/C++ and those who use them. I would have thought that there is more overlap between these two groups. I can imagine a similar role for Go in Unix utilities and backend infrastructure.
  - pron 10y ago
    > All dominant technologies that turned out to have a great impact once started out as something that many thought was a passing fad. Absolutely, but all fads started out as something many thought was lasting... > It's very sticky even though I never quite understood why you would want such a huge language barrier between those who implement interesting algorithms in C/C++ and those who use them. I'm not sure what you mean. My field is distributed/concurrent algorithms, and especially distributed databases, where Java has a significant lead over C/C++ where interesting algorithms are concerned.
    - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
      >I'm not sure what you mean. I mean things like Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, torch, mxnet, etc, basically all the leading deep learning frameworks. It's similar in several other math/science related fields. Not that Java doesn't exist in these fields, but it's an also ran.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        You forgetting the IoT devices coupled with distributed computing server side as well. Specially with the increasing focus on saving battery and making them as small as possible.
      - pron 10y ago
        First of all, that's a very small domain. I can similarly say that C++ is an "also ran" in business server-side applications. Second, I don't think that Watson, Spark and H2O qualify as merely "also ran".
        fauigerzigerk 10y ago
        >I can similarly say that C++ is an "also ran" in business server-side applications Absolutely you can, because it's true. C++ usage has declined dramatically in the last 10 years. It's no longer used as a mainstream language for business applications (something it was never good at). >Second, I don't think that Watson, Spark and H2O qualify as merely "also ran". Spark and H2O don't even qualify as also rans in the space I'm talking about. Watson may be an also ran, and significant parts of it are written in C++. I have no inside information, but it's not too difficult to imagine which parts that would be. It's pretty simple to see what's happening. Just look at Google. Google is a very Java friendly company. They do a lot in Java, just not their core AI stuff. Data shovelling and integration in Java. Core algorithms in C++. That's the pattern. So yes C++ is used in smaller domains. But these are the most interesting, most innovative and fastest growing domains. Those who really specialize in these areas overwhelmingly use C++. And it's entirely clear to me why that is the case. I tried to use Java for it (and Go). It doesn't work. I have to be able to load a ton of data into memory without constantly fighting a garbage collector, and I have to be able to specify exactly how that data is laid out in memory. pjmlp reminded us of IoT. Another up and coming field where Java isn't going to be the first choice. Same with games, video processing, etc. Java is falling back in most new application areas. Interestingly, web browsers seem to be a pretty good yardstick for many other completely unrelated tasks. Can you write a web browser in it that is up there with the best of them? If the answer is no, then that language is not going to be viable for a lot of other tasks as well.

pron 10y ago

> But there are huge wildcards like WebAssembly, the future of Java on Android and of course all the unknown unknowns that are probably going to disrupt all careful analysis including mine. With that I can completely agree. I can't predict when and how the demise of the JVM would come about, but I can see that it's not happening just yet. I do wonder about one meta-question, though: What effect does the trendy SV tech-marketing-speech has on developer technologies? Ruby was a huge SV hit and now it's ebbing, all without ever leaving a big impact on the software industry at large (sure, it was adopted by the odd "enterprise", but nothing on a grand scale). Now we see something similar (on a smaller scale, I think) with Haskell, Go and Elixir. Will there be a serious impact, or is it a passing SV fashion?

fauigerzigerk 10y ago
I don't know, but one thing is for sure. All dominant technologies that turned out to have a great impact once started out as something that many thought was a passing fad. Also, there are some languages that dominate significant niches seemingly forever, like Python as a frontend for math, science and machine learning or R for statistics. It's very sticky even though I never quite understood why you would want such a huge language barrier between those who implement interesting algorithms in C/C++ and those who use them. I would have thought that there is more overlap between these two groups. I can imagine a similar role for Go in Unix utilities and backend infrastructure.
- pron 10y ago
  > All dominant technologies that turned out to have a great impact once started out as something that many thought was a passing fad. Absolutely, but all fads started out as something many thought was lasting... > It's very sticky even though I never quite understood why you would want such a huge language barrier between those who implement interesting algorithms in C/C++ and those who use them. I'm not sure what you mean. My field is distributed/concurrent algorithms, and especially distributed databases, where Java has a significant lead over C/C++ where interesting algorithms are concerned.
  - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    >I'm not sure what you mean. I mean things like Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, torch, mxnet, etc, basically all the leading deep learning frameworks. It's similar in several other math/science related fields. Not that Java doesn't exist in these fields, but it's an also ran.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      You forgetting the IoT devices coupled with distributed computing server side as well. Specially with the increasing focus on saving battery and making them as small as possible.
    - pron 10y ago
      First of all, that's a very small domain. I can similarly say that C++ is an "also ran" in business server-side applications. Second, I don't think that Watson, Spark and H2O qualify as merely "also ran".
      - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
        >I can similarly say that C++ is an "also ran" in business server-side applications Absolutely you can, because it's true. C++ usage has declined dramatically in the last 10 years. It's no longer used as a mainstream language for business applications (something it was never good at). >Second, I don't think that Watson, Spark and H2O qualify as merely "also ran". Spark and H2O don't even qualify as also rans in the space I'm talking about. Watson may be an also ran, and significant parts of it are written in C++. I have no inside information, but it's not too difficult to imagine which parts that would be. It's pretty simple to see what's happening. Just look at Google. Google is a very Java friendly company. They do a lot in Java, just not their core AI stuff. Data shovelling and integration in Java. Core algorithms in C++. That's the pattern. So yes C++ is used in smaller domains. But these are the most interesting, most innovative and fastest growing domains. Those who really specialize in these areas overwhelmingly use C++. And it's entirely clear to me why that is the case. I tried to use Java for it (and Go). It doesn't work. I have to be able to load a ton of data into memory without constantly fighting a garbage collector, and I have to be able to specify exactly how that data is laid out in memory. pjmlp reminded us of IoT. Another up and coming field where Java isn't going to be the first choice. Same with games, video processing, etc. Java is falling back in most new application areas. Interestingly, web browsers seem to be a pretty good yardstick for many other completely unrelated tasks. Can you write a web browser in it that is up there with the best of them? If the answer is no, then that language is not going to be viable for a lot of other tasks as well.