Ask HN: Is Java Dying?

What do you think the future of the Java Language would be? What's a good replacement? Would the replacement run on the JVM?

It stands pretty strong. Lot of enterprise softwares are Java based. Most schools teach this as their main language. So, at least I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Java is now deeply-rooted in enterprise software, and in this field, once a project have been developed, radical technology changes occours on a 10-year+ basis. You won't believe how many big businesses still relies on Cobol development for manteniance. So, imho, Java isn't going away anytime soon.

The JVM is going strong and will stick around as a common platform for a variety of interesting languages for quite a while. Java the language is on the downward slope of the hype curve, but still has a huge base of existing installs so even though it is bleeding it will take a while for shock to set in. IMHO, the biggest future surprise will be how Java turns out to not be the COBOL of the future. COBOL is an antediluvian artifact that got the job done but lingers on in constant maintenance mode until enterprises bite the bullet and spend capital to do a wholesale replacement of the legacy mainframe system. The JVM is what will eliminate this refuge and last bastion for Java the language; the fact that other languages can run on the JVM and interface with old Java code means that incremental replacement is an option, and that option will be exercised more and more until the Java language becomes a distant memory.

This discussion often happens around JVM languages or dead-end projects that will need to be maintained until the end of the universe. If that's all that remains, then yeah, I'd say Java is dying, because people won't be actively writing new, interesting code in Java.

A couple of projects that suggest Java may not be dying (quite yet) are Roo and GWT. Roo is a spring-based framework that is very Rails-esque in terms of getting a web application up and running very quickly, though I haven't looked through much of the code. GWT is (as almost everyone knows) a very powerful framework for creating rich internet applications. It's a really major departure from page-based technologies.

Aside from that, there are still other projects like Guice, Gin, Struts 2 (and other MVC frameworks), ORM type work, and so forth (many of which are often used with GWT and are rolled into Roo).

While I've looked into these, none of them are enough to make me want to make a switch (back) from Ruby to Java programming. But I do think there's still enough going on there that I really wouldn't say Java is dying as a language that people use to build web applications (and I don't mean purely as a JVM or legacy code thing...) Some of the top innovation is still happening in Javaland.