The Second Coming of Java

I can&#x27;t figure out what the target audience of this post is.<p>It&#x27;s without doubt not programmers, as the article tries to explain what a programming language is &quot;...It’s a programming language, a way of writing software code...&quot;<p>And also, who is going to be interested in a story about java if they aren&#x27;t programmers or in the IT business?<p>The author seems to not even know what a JVM language is. &quot;...Originally, the Java virtual machine — aka the JVM — only ran code built with the Java programming language, but today, it runs all sorts of other languages...&quot;<p>Another example where the author is not being consistent &quot;...language called Clojure to a new and increasingly popular invention known as Scala...Lisp, a way of quickly scripting code&quot;<p>So now clojure is a language, Scala an invention and Lisp, a way of quickly scripting code.<p>This article is making noise without talking to anybody.

Calling the JVM <i>platform</i> a relic is a major mistake - the number of businesses that rely on the platform is massive.<p>However Java-the-language has been stagnant since Java 1.5 in September 2004. The Java API has had some changes but the language has remained mostly unchanged. The 1.8 version promises some nice improvements inspired by FP languages. Unfortunately, 1.8 has been continuously delayed with a current release date of sometime in early 2014. For JVM developers who care about their productivity, moving over to languages such as Scala, Groovy, and Clojure is the only sane choice.

Java has steadily grown over the years as the premier choice in the Enterprise. This is the reason that Java developers are relatively many (though I don&#x27;t believe they are falling from the sky as the article suggests).<p>This article is a little strange in general. The idea that Java was ever dead seems to be from the perspective of those who thought it was only for applets or devices. But the author acknowledges his awareness that this is not all Java ever was. So, to make the case that it died, he holds out a few examples of companies that tried something else, but couldn&#x27;t scale until they went to the JVM. He simultaneously ignores the entire Enterprise Java world.<p>Odd.

I love Java but I hate Oracle more than any other tech company. I don&#x27;t refuse to use the language but I don&#x27;t like to either if I can help it. I really hope with OpenJDK we can just forget about Oracle in the long term and have a solid language&#x2F;platform that is free from a corporate parent.

Java <i>applets</i> are dead, and should be. Great idea poorly executed.<p>Java on the server never died or even coughed. It&#x27;s huge. It&#x27;s a very rich ecosystem and performs very well at scale.<p>Java for <i>apps</i> is IMHO underrated. The biggest foot-shooting decision Sun made was to bundle shitware like the ask.com toolbar with the JRE, and never to solve the JRE deploy&#x2F;update problem that requires that every Java app bundle its own JRE. Solve that and java apps on desktop computers will make a comeback.

Java never really went away. This article to me is really more of an attack on the recently&#x2F;currently trendy technologies like Ruby on Rails than anything else.

The article is terrible when read from the perspective of a developer. But it does touch on something - often here on HN, start up culture and wider tech-centric sites if a technology is mainstream, not release 0.001 its not considered worthy of attention or praise and gets an unhealthy amount of sour grapes. Java&#x2F;JVM is ubiquitous in our field and has been quietly getting the job done for over 15 years in that sweet spot of fast, server-centric applications. I&#x27;m looking forward to v1.8 where it will pick up the features needed to keep it an essential tool.

I think that saying it&#x27;s the second coming is misleading. It was no longer considered sexy and cutting edge by the startup community, but as the web spread to every corner of every industry it was by far the language and platform of choice for thousands of IT departments. The result is an unmatched galaxy of scalable products that can be dropped in to any web application.

Some of this article reads as if it were a &quot;Special Advertisement Section&quot; paid by Oracle to fend off the negative press Java has been getting from the recent spate of security exploits.<p>Its good that it mentions the JVM-based languages though. I know many &quot;Java&quot; programmers who hate Java proper but love languages like Groovy, Scala, etc...

<i>&quot;Java is really the only choice when it comes to the requirements for a company like ours — extreme performance requirements and extreme scalability requirements. There is no viable alternative&quot;</i><p>What about C#?

&gt; The best way was a brand new architecture based on Java, a programing tool that grown more powerful than may expected.<p>Kudos on the proof reading.

With the 1.0 beta release of Ceylon, it is pretty clear the JVM is still a pretty useful basis for new languages... <a href="http://ceylon-lang.org/blog/2013/09/22/ceylon-1/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceylon-lang.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;22&#x2F;ceylon-1&#x2F;</a>

Neal Ford said: &quot;In a keynote address that I once co-presented with Martin Fowler, he made a perceptive observation: The legacy of Java will be the platform, not the language.&quot;

The performance metrics for some JVM-based technologies are really impressive but I continue to see performance problems with Java (the language) based software. In my field, very high speed network data processing work is done with C&#x2F;C++ out of necessity.

Never left, actually

The idea that Java is a &quot;Clinton-era relic&quot; is pretty ahistorical when you consider that Google and Amazon have been using Java on the server side since their early days - it never went away. The tech press just didn&#x27;t pay attention to it.

This article makes it sound like an either-or, but JRuby is a mature alternative that allows you to pair Ruby&#x27;s excellent web tools ecosystem (Rails foremost within it) with the ability to shunt off expensive tasks to Java or another JVM language.

isn&#x27;t this just a single example of &#x27;right tools for the job&#x27; and the common sense that ruby has abyssmal performance owing to &#x2F;its&#x2F; architecture compared to java and so simply can not scale as well as a like for like implementaton in java (which can be said to have abyssmal performance compared to &#x2F;good&#x2F; native bytes, C or C++ [although that gap is narrowing significantly in many areas - especially when sloppy code is involved]).

Even Groupon, arguably one of the largest Rails-based sites still out there, is moving away from Rails. (Mostly to Node.js although again, with some Java).<p>(And yes, obviously Ruby != Rails.)

The second coming of Java the platform (the JVM), at any rate.

I&#x27;m just a novice programmer, but it is my understanding that Clojure is a Lisp dialect, it doesn&#x27;t just feel like Lisp. Am I correct?

Java is slow. It&#x27;s going nowhere fast. LLVM on the other hand...

&quot;In the summer of 2011, Bob Lee - the [CTO] at Square and a former engineer at Google - announced... that the web was &#x27;on the cusp of a Java renaissance.&#x27;&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll bet he wouldn&#x27;t make that same announcement today.