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Is Java dead? No Will controversial headlines often get undeserved interest? Yes

junklight 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.

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 17y 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 17y 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.