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Like Java, The Cluebie continues to thrive year after year. The most obvious clue to the continued Cluebie strength is their endless blathering about how "Java is dead". Again. And again. Year after monotonous year, all while Java remains the most popular most used language for live projects being developed. Java has now been pronounced dead so many times that the Land Of The Phoenix has announced an enquiry into whether Phoenixs should convert to Java. With all evidence to the contrary - a quarter of programming language job openings, a fifth of programmers, a massive number of frameworks, Java classes for everything, a huge vendor marketplace, an extraordinary number of devices installed - nevertheless, Java is continually pronounced dead by the Cluebies. Let's just hope none of these Cluebies provide investment advice - with a track record that consistently wrong they would have recommended every disaster from Enron to Lehman as the next big winner to invest in!
As I've said many times, Java is not the perfect language. If something better comes along that gains popularity, I'll happily switch to it. But that just hasn't happened in the last 15 years. Dynamic languages don't (yet?) have the maintainability nor the frameworks nor the IDEs to match the productivity, maintainability and adaptability that Java gives you. Over the last 15 years we've seen wave after wave of wannabe languages. Most have challenged based on productivity benefits, but if that was even slightly sufficient, the 4GLs back in the early 1990s would have taken off and dominated the IT landscape and Java wouldn't even have got a look in from the beginning.
The closest challenger is C# - not because it's better, but only because it's essentially a Java clone. And really, that's a bit tragic. By now I would have expected something better than Java and it's C# clone to have come along and taken the programming world by storm. Instead, it looks like we're just reinventing distributed services and hosting providers yet again (and calling them PaaS and Clouds) as the current IT fad. Ah well, I suppose it pays the bills. But it's not where we should be. For now, Java is still the language of choice, and there's no serious alternative on the horizon just yet.
Now on to all our usual links to Java performance tools, news, articles and, as ever, all the extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.
Java performance tuning related news.
Java performance tuning related tools.
Back to newsletter 147 contents
