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If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

drdobbs.com

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Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#12
post #4

Well what do they teach in schools? When I was attaining my degree during the end of the last century, Java (and XML) was being trumpeted as the saving grace for all soon to be software professionals. We were all in love OO programming and this scratched us right where C++ left an itch. Oh Java Beans and Servlets, how we loved thee. It’ll take decades before all the code created by those who came right before me and…

I don't think the industry is driven by academia. Plus, no CS degree program worth the paper it's printed on even claims to teach Java. If yours did, I'd ask for a refund.

Typically schools USE Java to teach computer science topics, for instance my university used it in the Intro course, where we learned program flow control and some OO principles, and in our Data Structures course where it was nothing more than a tool to complete assignments. We used Scheme to explore other programming paradigms, ASM for our architecture courses, C for our OS course, etc. Other than that we could use any language we wanted for other courses.

Basically if you come out of school claiming you "learned" Java, or any language, it probably means you are lying or went to a bad school.

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#13
I just wish they'd fix the generics - Been writing some c# recently, and the lack of type erasure is a really nice advantage.

The decision to do it that way because of backwards compatibility issues looks really shortsighted now - virtually nobody runs JVMs from before they introduced generics, but we still have this hack in place to maintain compatibility with them. Would have been better to break the compatibility and introduce a little temporary pain, but have a better result 10 years later.

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#14
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's why kernels are written in java. If you're writing complex code java is rarely the answer as it requires so much complexity itself. Hint: Most java projects just appear to be complex because of the poor quality of the language (and developers). Java is hands down the choice for simple projects written by way too many poor quality developers. The JVM can barely manage 12 GB of memory, Java is a piece of cr…

This comment is laughable at best. Ignorant might be a better word for it.

Care to elaborate?

Here's the 12 GB of memory...

http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.0/operations/tuning

As far as the language is concerned...

What problem of high performance & complexity apps does Java 7 solve that C++11 doesn't?

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#15
post #4

Well what do they teach in schools? When I was attaining my degree during the end of the last century, Java (and XML) was being trumpeted as the saving grace for all soon to be software professionals. We were all in love OO programming and this scratched us right where C++ left an itch. Oh Java Beans and Servlets, how we loved thee. It’ll take decades before all the code created by those who came right before me and…

I just started university and it's still all Java. I found out one university in my country (Germany) teaches Scheme in their introductory course, but sadly I had already enrolled at a different one at that time.

The high school CS curriculum here is also basically an introduction to Java.

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#16
post #3

Any talk of Java "dying" is just nonsensical Java hands down is the most obvious choice for any applications that require performance, yet are too complicated to write and support in C/C++/other lower level languages. Java JIT is very mature unlike JITs for most other languages, which largely remain at the level of experimental projects and fall short on key production requirements. Given that the entire Hadoop ecosy…

Oh come on. To say it is the "obvious" choice is heavy editorializing. I agree it's not going anywhere. As others have pointed out there is a fine language called C++. In point of fact Java is not the obvious choice, that's bit much. There are some very good arguments of Java that may or may not be deal breakers but are still issues ... There must be a middle ground from the power of C that is not OOP gone awry. :)

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#17
There's a lot wrong with Java, but even while having moved on and learned / used professionally many other languages I keep coming back to it and its ecosystem. There is still not another language / platform that provides the same level of a variety of things that are important to me:

    * platform independence
    * performance
    * low level features
    * simplicity and clarity (for reading, writing not so much)
    * infrastructure/tools (IDE, visualvm, etc)
Admittedly, I lean more and more into JVM languages like Groovy and Scala these days. But even then I still drop into Java to write parts of the code that I want to be as fast as possible.

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#18
Java may not be dying, but it does take off early on Fridays for golf.

Java is not dying the same way Cobol was not dying 10 years ago. It has a lot of legs left but nobody is 'hoping' to use it, they are told to do so.

Java is and always has been almost completely a corporate tool. Again, like Cobol, so the 'cool kids' are not going to give it much love. It's too slow to execute to compete with C++, its too slow to write to compete with Groovy or Scala. And all the cool kids pick an extreme and vote that way.

Java is not 'dead', but thought leaders aren't using it right now. The people who inherited the decision of thought leaders of 15 years ago are using it, so the writing is on the wall, its just going to take a while to be read.

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#19
Java is dying because it requires more and more resources to make it work. People look at the growing resource requirements and think "wow, look at how Java is growing! We even are teaching middle schoolers Java now!"

Wasn't the point of Java to release developers from having to worry about memory? Well, now we have to worry about everything else. It's a failed abstraction and now we have to live with it.

Re: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

#20

>A recurring prejudice in the forums where the cool kids hang out (Hacker News, Reddit, etc.) is against Java, the language. Maybe I've been reading a different Hacker News, but I haven't seen this sentiment at all one HN, especially with the love for everything JVM (Clojure, Scala) and all the Database/Big Data tools written in Java (Cassandra, Hadoop, HBase)

No, now I'm not one to fall on either side here but there is certainly ... a lack of love for Java on HN. I mean its definitely there. If you hnsearch, you'll see. I agree, the JVM is a different issue.
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