Is Java going to die soon?

[MisterWhite]

Now i have heard that Java is kind of a bad choice to start learning nowadays because of it being slower that other languages. I'd like to hear from those who use java as one of their daily job languages - is Java bad? is it slowly drifting from others?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Java is far from dying. While it's not as efficient as other languages, it is used so widely that it would be very, very difficult to stop using it at this point. 

[DioOmicida]

I think it really depends on the line of business and where you want to go, I suppose.
In my line, data management, Java and Oracle aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Heck, we still use Progress and I don't think any other company around our network does.

[DioOmicida]

4 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

it is used so widely

As they like to remind us on updates: "Currently powering 3 billion devices"

[flibberdipper]

It would be damn near impossible to completely eliminate it.

 

It would be great if Minecraft ditched it. I'm so sick of how it performs lmao

[jslowik]

Java won't go anywhere for quite some time. Google uses it, and if memory serves Twitter is utilizing it as well. Those are just some examples.

Someone once told me that if you were a large company you were probably using Java, and if you were a smaller to mid-sized company you were most likely using .Net. Ymmv.

 

< just ask Duke, Java will be around for a while!

[madknight3]

Java isn't going away anytime soon. It's still in active development, Java 9 is expected to be released later this year, and it's very widely used across multiple platforms (desktop, web, mobile). It also has a very rich ecosystem (many libraries, tools, learning/support resources, etc). Even if people were to stop using Java for new projects, there will still be a large number of Java applications that will still need to be maintained.

 

The JVM is also a pretty popular platform to develop on as well. Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, etc are all using the JVM.

 

The speed argument is used for pretty much anything that isn't C/C++ but that doesn't stop people from using other languages. The reality is not every application needs that level of performance and many people would rather work in other languages.

[DevBlox]

Not even close. It is improving continuously, the features of Java 8 for example are a great gift that improved my code a great deal, there's still a long way to go to perfection so I'm waiting for what they still have in store. It will stay for a long long time, at least in server applications domain, where IMO it is at it's best. Though I agree it went places it shouldn't have (like applications that ran in a browser and had a million security holes), but it never took off there anyway, luckily.

 

I always get a bit frustrated when people try to tell me that Java is slow, but can't explain why, or their explanations are off by 10-20 years. I suggest not listening if you don't know better. Java is 'slow' because it is a JIT compiled language, the same kind of 'slow' that any other similar language (like C# and friends) experience, but has the added bonus of being one of the first (if not the first) of this kind. That means there are people that used it 20 years ago, maybe for a short while only and hated it. No wonder - at the time it was cutting edge and it was running on old hardware that had a habit of running out of juice. Fast forward to now and I still wonder if they're the same people or not that complain about it being a memory hog and slow, when it's marginally different in performance to similar languages. It has it's shortcomings compared with Microsoft's solution, naturally, newer solutions tend to be better if they mature enough. The added benefits of such a system (Java, .Net and alike) outweigh all of their shortcomings, especially considering that hardware is cheap these days compared to then and programmers can be more laid back with their resource management. It speeds development up massively. But it does not stop from fast services being written in Java. Heck, where I work as a developer we have some new shiny high-load back-end applications written in-house with Java, and they are brilliant, you won't hear any undue performance complaints towards Java from me.

[Cantanko]

I have a special place in my heart reserved for hating Java, and one right next to it for the Microsoft CLR :-D

I hate it far, far less than I did - as DevBlox says above a lot of my frustrations were based upon very outdated concepts until I actually did some performance testing. I encounter Java mainly when using things like elasticsearch, neo4j, orientdb and so on and in those instances it generally it stays out of the way and does what it's supposed to do. Also, machines are just so preposterously grunty compared to those from Java's infancy, plus with the improvement in compiler tech, most of my objection-on-principle to compiling to intermediate bytecode goes away.

 

Having said that, the "write once, run anywhere" paradigm is complete bull as soon as you get anything vaguely complex, with (often badly written) middleware and vendor-supplied applications only running on a certain variant of an archaic JRE that's both unsupported and full of security holes.

 

I guess my common complaints aren't with Java per se, but the state of a lot of the Java software I encounter. The newer stuff is great, but having to have three versions of the JRE on my Windows workstation so that various applications work correctly (I'm looking at you, Dell DRAC remote console and you too, Cisco ASA manager!) is a royal PITA...

[Azgoth 2]

Java is, in some places, losing ground to other languages (mostly Python, as is my impression), but it's nowhere near dead.  For one, it's still a massively useful language with huge numbers of libraries for every application you can think of.  For two, it's been around so long that--especially in a commercial setting--there's too much institutional momentum for it to go away any time soon.  As a corollary, it's a pretty mature langauge at this point with lots of documentation and tutorials, so it's not hard to find somewhere to learn or a guide for how to do some particular task in Java.  For three, as performance goes, it's actually much better than a lot of people give it credit for, even if it might not be the best language in terms of resource use/optimization. 

[BrightCandle]

Java remains the number 1 used language in the world, and of late most indexes actually suggest its gaining market share. Its far from dead and its one of the best performing languages around, its very much worth knowing as a programmer.

[Djole123]

no cuz minecraft iz on java

[Blade of Grass]

23 hours ago, jslowik said:

Java won't go anywhere for quite some time. Google uses it, and if memory serves Twitter is utilizing it as well. Those are just some examples.

Someone once told me that if you were a large company you were probably using Java, and if you were a smaller to mid-sized company you were most likely using .Net. Ymmv.

 

< just ask Duke, Java will be around for a while!

Not just them, but practically all large tech companies. It's one of the most common language on this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites

[BuckGup]

We can only hope

[Jedi]

Addressing the title of this thread: no. Not by a long shot. So long as there is a need for Android applications, there will likely be Java.

 

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Now i have heard that Java is kind of a bad choice to start learning nowadays because of it being slower that other languages.

 

Um... it is slower than other languages in certain cases, and much faster than other languages than others. I don't think Java is inherently slower than "other languages"... just that other languages can perform particular tasks faster and, conversely, Java can perform certain tasks quicker than other languages.

 

 

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I'd like to hear from those who use java as one of their daily job languages - is Java bad?

 

Nope. I quite like Java... it has a nice syntax.

 

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is it slowly drifting from others?

 

Nope. It's still the second most popular language on Github, followed by Python.

[Nuluvius]

Look at it this way, Delphi and Visual Basic are still here and in wide use.

[Blade of Grass]

22 hours ago, SamStrecker said:

We can only hope

What do you have against Java?

[BuckGup]

Just now, Blade of Grass said:

What do you have against Java?

It's nice but javascript malware like R32 and it is sluggish and bloaty 

[Blade of Grass]

14 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

It's nice but javascript malware like R32 and it is sluggish and bloaty 

Java is not the same thing as JavaScript, have you confused the two?

[BuckGup]

4 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

Java is not the same thing as JavaScript, have you confused the two?

I know they are miles apart as javascript isn't really java at all. I just hear programmers all the time complaining about java and how it could be better

[Blade of Grass]

Just now, SamStrecker said:

I know they are miles apart as javascript isn't really java at all. I just hear programmers all the time complaining about java and how it could be better

That doesn't make it a bad language though. People will complain about anything. Java's strong object oriented design paradigms can be frustrating at times, but I've found it to generally be better than a few other languages I've used (JS, PHP, Python). 

Plus, a lot of the Java hate is just bandwagoning and out of date. Speed wise it's not that much slower and in most cases the speed will not be a limiting factor. 

[fizzlesticks]

2 hours ago, SamStrecker said:

I just hear programmers all the time complaining about java and how it could be better

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."  -Bjarne Stroustrup

[Danielh90]

On 3/31/2016 at 1:03 PM, MisterWhite said:

Now i have heard that Java is kind of a bad choice to start learning nowadays because of it being slower that other languages. I'd like to hear from those who use java as one of their daily job languages - is Java bad? is it slowly drifting from others?

Why you say that java will always be alive.