

Ask HN: Java in 5 Years? - bluedevil2k

There's been a lot going on with Java in the past 2 months.  Oracle sues Google.  Oracle and IBM dump Apache.<p>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.<p>My question:  where does HN really see Java in 5 years?
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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.

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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.

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nailer
Someone makes a Java alike, not called Java. It wins, like a Unix-alike not
called Unix won a few years ago.

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codedivine
Java or JVM?

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Jabbles
Cobol programmers make a ton? Interesting, source please!

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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=cobol+programmer&l1=&tm=1)
[http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=java+programmer&l1=&...](http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=java+programmer&l1=&tm=1)
[http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=ruby+programmer&l1=&...](http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=ruby+programmer&l1=&tm=1)
[http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=ocaml+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.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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 . . .

