Java is much closer to C++ than COBOL. COBOL has been massively obsolete for decades. Java has a lot of historical cruft but the basic syntax is still somewhat

Java is much closer to C++ than COBOL. COBOL has been massively obsolete for decades. Java has a lot of historical cruft but the basic syntax is still somewhat modern, mostly based off of C++ and agruable better. Like C++, it's modern features are being slowly added. There's a huge difference between Java 8 and 11, in performance and features. Innovation is hardly dead. Java EE and Spring are both terrible. I recommend trying some of the newer frameworks out there to see how much nicer things have become. DropWizard is my favorite right now. I'm no Oracle fan, but Java is more "open" in many ways than it has been since the beginning. It wasn't till a few years ago we had a feature-complete high performance OSS implementation as the standard. Oracle will try to ruin it, but the GPL JDK and history of projects being forked away from them makes it fairly safe. It's not in the interest of any Java user to have more than one standard. IMO Java isn't going anywhere. It's been top 3 most popular language for over a decade. JS is somewhat promising but will never match Java in performance and multi-threading support due to core design decisions. Go is too verbose to get industry buyin to replace Java in most use cases. WASM is promising in the far future but it will take years to have a full browser and server ABI. The only real contenter to replace Java is C# and so far it's not getting much traction. If anything killed Java it would be C#. Value types, no type Erasure, unsafe code and some native vector support. But it hasn't and probably won't ever dethrone Java. Java has a combination of decent features and an insanely huge amount of library support that makes it the default language of many companies.