Java Is Still Free

> It's definitely not the trendy language anymore.

It stoppend being "trendy" sometime in the last millenium. "Trendy" isn't the same thing as useful or widely adopted, though.

> But new languages are objectively better and getting adopted at a faster rate than ever.

They also get dropped and replaced by the next "trendy" thing at a faster rate than ever.

Teacher at school, teach java. They needed like 10 year to be able to teach java.

They don't want really but they don't have choice. Can we manage that they learn how to program, and not a specific language. Specially when it's not the better one? Only because there's some demand on the market is making the current language. Now there's no more Java offer, only few one.

We always (in my country specialy) lake of fast moving, it's why these change make 10 year at least for that we adapt.

The problem with write ups like these is they send the exact opposite message of what was intended to be sent. Even those people who didn't receive the news, will now hear about this.

On the other hand, the entire write up seems to attempt to convince people to keep faith in Oracle. The problem with this kind of talk is you are the mercy of some VP in Oracle, whose one decision could change everything and given the fact they are already thinking of monetizing(and to some extent have) Java, it most certainly will.

In most companies merely migrating Java versions is a process that happens over several months if not years. Asking people to change their entire install bases, and expecting them to not worry about it is pointless. These people have to redo not just regression tests but a range of security tests. And of course even after all that you are still not sure about the future.

The right question to ask at this point is, about the alternatives.

One of the greatest things about Java is the library ecosystem. The language itself is not that enjoyable, but Java has had so much money driving behind it that you will find pretty much a library for every thing on Earth.

The only languages that can match that ecosystem are Perl and Python. And may be Javascript.

My only concern with Java is related to Clojure. I liked that language as a practical alternative to Lisp, if Java has no future, then Clojure's biggest sell 'Java interop' doesn't have a future too.

Do you honestly write in Java/Scala/Clojure etc ?

Because I have never met a single JVM developer who either (a) wants another JVM fork, (b) wants OpenJDK to be undermined or (c) thinks Oracle has been anything other than a pretty great steward of the platform.

there's more to it than that. let's take C#, as i find that interesting and a bit sad. C# had what seemed like huge mindshare around the 2.0 era. great tooling, sane language, great developer experience. of course it helped that Windows was still huge. now? it still exists, but i'm happy to bet it will never become that big again for various reasons (windows only for a long time, still windows-centric, sucky webdev + mobile).

java has issues, too. i'm not talking about the language per se, but the whole situation. the end-user java experience sucks, most people know it mainly for requiring updates, making browsers insecure, and using ungodly amounts of RAM. in a world with containerization, the write-once-run-anywhere marketing line isn't so interesting anymore. groovy, scala, clojure, and kotlin injected some cool ideas, but might have done more harm by cannibalizing the community and proving that just because it runs on the JVM doesn't make it great (to some people :)).

we agree it isn't going anywhere fast. huge corporations use it daily still which means huge paychecks. but getting by isn't the same as thriving, and i think it's a valid question to ask. because just like C#, simply adding new language features isn't always enough.