This is a chart taken from O'Reilly's "State of Computer Book Market", which shows the market share of major programming languages.
If you take a close look you can see that Java's market share declined steadily over the past 5 years. To that's not surprising at all, although I used to ignore those numbers and think of Java as the Silver bullet. Unfortunately I don't have a blog post that underlines my opinion back than, but people who know me will tell you, that I used to defend Java almost with my life.
You might argue, that those are just market share numbers of books sold around the topic of Java. People might not buy that many books anymore these days, since there are so many online tutorials or webinars. Well, at least for me, those number reflect the current state of demand for Java projects on the market very well.
Although Java is a great language and I don't think it will go away that soon, it's not my personal one stop shop anymore. If I'd start a new project today, I would take a look around first. Maybe there are other languages which are more suitable for the task. Maybe even different platforms like .NET or some language with Java under the covers.
2 comments:
I think the whole closures debate shows that Java has come to a turning point. The Java language is no longer able to keep up with the newer, more dynamic languages. Sure, you can try to extend the language, but extensions usually lack elegance or consistency.
IMHO, the Java platform has always been better than its main language. It's good to see that Sun is starting to support other languages more seriously (JRuby, JYthon, etc.).
I definitely agree on Java as a platform being more valuable than the language itself. The JVM is gonna stay and has the potential to be the platform for future languages.
As for closures I'm torn between integrating them and just leaving Java as it is right now. I guess I tend to moving on to another language instead of increasing Java's complexity.
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