For the ones saying Java is old and is following the path of Cobol: get lost. Java is and will be, for some long time, a bleeding edge in software programming.
Sure it’s changing it’s target, and it’s doing that naturally. In the early ’00s there were Java desktop application popping up anywhere. It was slow, not responsive at all and ugly. Things changed during the years, SWT became a super glam framework in Java desktop programming and I used it A LOT with good results (but can’t say pleasure). I agree there are far better languages and frameworks for the client side, but no matter what Apple says, Java is here and will stay.
But the truth is the best Java ecosystem is server side. J2EE applications rock the enterprise, servlet containers rock web applications.
Still, Java is getting old. Being old means being wise, having a huge background and being able to face almost any situation. It’s not the framework. It’s the language. And languages are subject to fashion, changing needs, will to improve.
Especially with this recent big interest in functional languages an mixed “compiled+interpreted” languages, Java is helplessly behind.
Reinventing a language (some people do…) must be a beautiful experience. I never tried that and probably never will, but it must shake your world. Still, as my friend and researcher Francesco Zanitti told me yesterday (he’s working on much more advanced stuff compared to my today’s topic), theory and real world are so distant in computer languages some can get demotivated.
Java rocks, but is in need of a grandchild. A successor. A language that can take the hierarchy of Java and bring what’s been done so far to another level, adding new possibilities rather than limiting what’s available now to get to a new frontier. Some may say this limits the possibilities to improve, to invent, but the fact is this is not a contextual language, nor a scripting engine. I’m talking about a commercial language that has to be able to add spice to something that already works well. That can handle complexities that can scare the crap out of you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be “born from Java”, it can also come from elsewhere, but the fact stays: to obtain adoption, you have to pull current knowledge and wisdom out of Java.
If I had solutions to this dilemma, I wouldn’t be here writing. Still I have some major suggestions for you to extend your interests on what’s out there:
Scala is a very intriguing, elegant programming language. It integrates both object oriented and functional programming and can interact with Java pretty well, resulting a flavour that is, in my opinion, unique. The project is mature and the success stories are not few: one for all Twitter.
my pick:
Groovy shares many things with Scala, also the syntax has a lot in common. Object oriented and functional programming work as one and the interaction with Java is absolutely surprising (no extra work at all). The learning curve is ridiculous because Groovy basically accepts all Java syntax and lets you learn what else it can offer. It’s not too elegant, nor too fast, but incarnates beautifully what I meant in this article. The project is not fully mature in my opinion, but is endorsed by SpringSource and used as main language in the Grails web framework (that has many success stories).
I’m certainly missing some great tools. These are just two good languages I had the luck to work with directly and had fun with. I’ll be writing more about Groovy soon, but in the meantime, take your time to try them yourself, it’s worth it.
