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Ask HN: Java in 5 Years?

19 points by bluedevil2k ↗ HN
There's been a lot going on with Java in the past 2 months. Oracle sues Google. Oracle and IBM dump Apache.

Even commenters on HN are all over the map. Java will be fine. Java is the next Cobol. (Keep in mind that Cobol programmers make a TON now). Java should be splintered. IBM and Oracle are doing a good thing.

My question: where does HN really see Java in 5 years?

11 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] thread
petercooper
Java is too entrenched as a language to seriously languish in 5 years. Its popularity for new projects might be significantly reduced, but there'll still be a ton of work available due to the built-up glut of projects and developers (even more so than COBOL ever experienced).

Java as an ecosystem and including the VM? We might see it splinter a little but the VM is even more entrenched than the language. There are too many other languages and ecosystems sitting on top of the JVM and its compatible libraries that I doubt any damage will be negligible in 5 years even if Oracle really screws things up from here.

Jabbles
Cobol programmers make a ton? Interesting, source please!
brehaut
If you go by these links, Java programmers (87k) equally well off as Cobol programmers (87k) and both are better off than Ruby programmers (84k). If you really want the dollars, ocaml is apparently where its at (149k)

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=cobol+programmer&l1=&... http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=java+programmer&l1=&... http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=ruby+programmer&l1=&... http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=ocaml+programmer&l1=

Caveat: clearly this isn't science, and i don't know how the sites keywords work. might be way off base.

IHaveASolution
OCaml is getting that much money from quantitative finance firms &c. if you are curious. There are a not insignificant number of them that use OCaml, and it is the only time I have heard of OCaml being used.
mhd
APL programmer (rarely used outside finance, too) gets you 94 kilobucks. I guess the OCaml average contains very few samples.
Bigendian
OCaml is used for code verification tools too (Microsoft z3, CEA Frama-C, INRIA Coq, AbsInt Astree, Facebook pfff, ...) and for system programming a lot (Citrix Xen Toolstack, MLstate OPA, MyLife.com, MLdonkey, Unison, ...). If you have heard of OCaml only for finance, you have probably not searched enough.
nailer
Someone makes a Java alike, not called Java. It wins, like a Unix-alike not called Unix won a few years ago.
kaffiene
I don't really see this as having much effect on Java at all. I see a lot of nerd rage at Oracle for how they've managed Java so far (including from me - I think Elison is a douche) but face it - nerds ain't the target market for Java. Nerds have hated Java from the outset - it's not cool enough, it doesn't have whizzy features from functional programming, it's too slow, it's too corporate, it's too hyped.

Well, now over a decade later and a tonne of real work has been done by real companies with Java. By people who don't give a shit about whether it's buzzword compliant or 'free as in speech'.

Nerds getting their knickers in a twist about freedom or whether you can write 'hello world' in 20 less characters, or whether you can implement currying in Java are just not the target market for Java and quite frankly, outside a very small cloistered world, they're not really an important market, either.

One day, Java will be superceeded, and I expect that it will be something akin to Gosu - kinda like Java, Java compatable but 'better' enough in some way to make people want to move - much like the C to C++ transition happened: people can keep their existing investments and codebases, but start doing new stuff in a way which adds some value. I don't think such a language exists yet - Gosu doesn't offer enough I think. But one day,

akeefer
That's kind of one of our explicit design goals with Gosu, honestly: we're not trying to set the world on fire with something no one's ever seen before, but we are trying to make sure that eventually we have a language that is A) has the "good" qualities of Java (whatever you characterize those as), B) is close enough that it's an easy transition for people, and C) provides useful improvements on Java (type inference, closures, first-class scripts, some kinds of metaprogramming). In other words, we'd like it to be a no-brainer for people to prefer Java over Gosu, even for people who really like Java and are scared of, say, Scala or Clojure (let alone some non-JVM dynamically-typed language). Hopefully we'll get there some day . . .
rarestblog
I have a friend who has a high position in a huge company that is Java-only. I asked him just the other day about the situation and pretty much he said there were no alternatives to Java in many sectors, especially banking. "If they make it a paid platform, everyone will just pay". Pretty much they aren't worried even a bit. Also, seeing how well Oracle (database) is used in corporate environments - I think Java is going to do just fine (in corporations), but it might get slightly out-of-reach for common developers.