Interesting interview on our blog with three senior engineers about the future of Java. Interesting points made about cold start ups, hopes for new releases, and the biggie - whether Java will be as widely used in the next five years.
What does everyone think?
Top comments (2)
Very interesting interviews because you can see the impression some people have of Java. I think one thing that’s missing from the discussion here is there are a lot of new codebases being implemented in Java and you hear about some of the largest youngest companies adopting it, like Uber and Netflix. So it’s hard to say that Java won’t be as widespread in five years but who knows.
Probably, even though it's debatable whether that should be the case. Brand new CS and CEG undergraduate students all over the US are starting out with Java again this year, and until that stops being the default case, it's going to continue to be at least a reasonably widely used language simply because a lot of people know how to use it.
Honestly, it stupefies me that Java is still being used as a first programming language to such a degree (though I suppose it's better than BASIC or COBOL). It's got a lot more 'magic incantations' that you need to have than many other popular languages, and a number of the assumptions or quirks in the JVM lead to new developers producing bugs that shouldn't have happened in the first place when they go to other languages that don't make such weird assumptions. C (or even C++) is a better starting point for CEG, and any of a number of other HLL's (other than JavaScript) are better starting points for CS.