Java is becoming the new Cobol

Does this article contain any facts that are actually correct? Java losing marketshare to AJAX? <p>"One bit of good news: developers and analysts agree that Java is alive and well for internally developed enterprise apps." Has Java ever been alive for anything else? <p>Java's big problem is incompatibility across platforms?<p>Ruby gaining popularity because of built-in shopping carts?<p>And what's the connection between losing marketshare and becoming the new Cobol? I mean, Perl is losing marketshare...<p>This article is utterly clueless.

There's so much bashing of Java lately. It reminds me of the kind of daytime TV rants that begin with "Well, Oprah, I think that man needs to..." <p>When people decide to end a relationship, they often start to think of all the ways they have been wronged to justify it. I always think, eh, maybe "that man" was fine, you just got tired of him. You don't need to justify a break-up to me - feel free to go. <p>Personally, I don't feel as aggrieved by Java as some people do. It was certainly better than working in C++. It certainly made web programming easier. Tomcat was simple to install and configure. Ant was a good build too (but I did start to wonder why all the XML configuration for something that could probably be standardized). Struts was heavy and cumbersome. Hibernate got on my nerves - why do I have to deal with all this XML. Spring was an improvement, but I broke up with Java when I started reading about Inversion of Control and all the design patterns. Why am I doing this when the actual code I care about is going to be, oh, maybe a thousand lines, tops? <p>"Well Oprah, Java is no good, let me tell you about what he did, in the beginning he was so nice, always bringing me flowers, but now he just sits on the sofa an plays video games, why even last week, when I got home, working hard to pay the bills, he's just sitting there..."<p>Eh, my take on it is that technologies and programming frameworks move on (often by finding something that was done better in the past and modernizing it, or even just dressing it up). Many if not most of the "breakthroughs" in rails were already present in other languages. <p>There's really no need to hate Java or decide it's a foul language that has wronged you. Maybe you're just ready to move on. Nothing wrong with that. <p>(of course, if you're a Lisper who suspected Java was stupid from the very beginning, I suppose you are entitled to your victory fist pump when everyone starts to wake up and get it). <p>I'm sick of programming in Java now. I'm not sure what's next, but Ruby and Rails certainly opened my eyes to how much more pleasant and productive other frameworks and languages can be. I just don't feel any real need to hate Java, because it did make my life a little better (almost) a decade ago.

From the "Info-Tech Research Group" paragraph, this looks like submarine PR by Microsoft.

Cobol doesn't have useful libraries like Lucene.<p>Cobol didn't convince pointy-haired bosses that technology which only 10-15 years before was considered an academic curiosity ought to be standard for business application development.

Relative to the other languages mentioned, I think the only significant way Java is similar to Cobol have is that common conventions require a lot of typing.<p>Consider an example from the programming language shootout:<p>Java:<p><pre><code> public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{ int sum = 0; StreamTokenizer lineTokenizer = new StreamTokenizer(System.in); while (lineTokenizer.nextToken() != StreamTokenizer.TT_EOF) { sum += lineTokenizer.nval; } System.out.println(Integer.toString(sum)); } </code></pre> Ruby:<p><pre><code> count = 0 l="" STDIN.each{ |l| count += l.to_i } puts count</code></pre>

I think I first heard the phrase "Java is the new COBOL" about 3 or 4 years ago.<p><i>Ronen says Ruby offers pre-built structures -- say, a shopping cart for an e-commerce site -- that you'd have to code from the ground up using Java.</i><p>Fact-checking 101:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;q=%22java+shopping+cart%22" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;q=%22java+shopping+ca...</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ruby+shopping+cart%22" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ruby+shopping+cart%22</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;q=%22ruby+on+rails+shopping+cart%22" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;q=%22ruby+on+rails+sh...</a>

I wonder what <i>Infoworld</i> was saying about Java 5 years ago. But I can probably guess.

Though that means that if the adoption of Ruby on Rails in the enterprise becomes widespread enough, it too will take the crown of "the new Cobol". Or it might be .NET<p>What I mean is the rising population of unskilled so-called programmers who have no business programming entering into the marketplace. I've already seen crap Ruby code floating around, including ones that were "ported" (I use the word lightly) from PHP or Perl. (They copied-pasted the code and change things here and there to make it Ruby-like ... doing things like retaining the $ in front of variables, or ...) <p>The DailyWTF is a monument to these pseudo-programmers. <p>When a language is sufficiently popular enough that pseudo-programmers perceive it as a way of getting secure income ... without having to expend skull sweat ... that language is flooded with utter crap. The result? COBOL. <p>People have said you want the top n-th percent of the programmers. For me, I just want to work with programmers that don't suck.

And the memory footprint thing....<p>I understand the concern for mobile/embedded stuff and don't know much about how well Java does there.<p>However, when a half gig of RAM for a server costs well under $100, it just doesn't matter much for regular 'ol server apps. Even a "bloated" J2EE app doesn't usually require more than a gig of heap (unless you're doing massive, in-memory caching). Yeah, it's nice to use less memory, but there are 50 other things I'd give equal weight to (the availability of libraries being about 25 of those 50).<p>As I write this comment, I am tuning a Java rules (rete) app that is using an 11 gig heap :)

In related news, black is becoming the new white.

I haven't seen anyone else comment that this whole thing is just a friggin' PR piece from Twiki. And before all you 19-year-olds-fresh-out-of-logic-101 scream "ad hominem!", let me remind you that in the <i>real</i> world you should always consider the source.<p>I'm not about to defend Java, but what a lot of the Ruby newbies are too young to know is that we <i>had</i> a dynamic language in the enterprise. It was called Visual Basic - you just declared everything "Variant". The result was a bunch of god-awful messes.<p>Personally, I like flavors of Lisp. But I don't know that I'd prescribe it for the IT department at Wells Fargo.

great, all my cs classes are taught in java.

About time...

It really is true. Nobody wants to program in Java anymore, if you do it's just because you don't know any better. However, just like Cobol, there is going to be money available for a long time for anyone that keeps their Java skills sharp.