Could a programming language last “forever”? What about a thousand years? How long do you think Java will last?
I think there are a certain class of programming languages that eventually just die. First, people stop writing new programs in that language; the language is only used in the maintenance of old programs. Eventually, those programs stop being maintained and no one uses that language any more. That language is now on its death bed. After a while (sometimes a long while), those unmaintained programs are decommissioned. And then the language is dead.
I wonder how many languages are like that. Destined to die. Surely all languages will eventually disappear (what with the looming heat death of the universe), so instead I wonder: What languages will last a thousand years?
How long will Java last? Not a thousand years, I’ll wager. It’s a hard question to answer, when no computing language is even 60 years old (timeline). FORTRAN was coined in the 1950’s, and it’s still going. I’d say BCPL and B are probably dead (the precursors to C). And I assume no-one is still using Algol 58/60/68.
How long will Java last? I think the last line of Java will be written before the end of this century. And I’ll give those (thousands? millions?) of unmaintained Java programs another century to be decommissioned. All that Java hype: over by 2100, dead by 2200.
Why don’t I think people will be writing programs in Java in 100 years time? A few reasons, but mainly this: Software is getting so much more complex as time goes on that we will not be able to write that software in a language like Java.
But I’m not sad. I don’t care, I’ll be dead by then.
Well, there is one aspect of this that makes me sad. I love being a part of our global Java community. We do good things. And there is Ant, and the whole Jakarta crew, and the rest of the OS Java crowd. And there is JavaOne, and magazines, and blogs. And there is Sun, too, I suppose.
And in 100 years, no one will care.
24 Comments
Does it really matter?
Java is already dead.
I’m with John Maynard Keynes – "This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs," he wrote early in his career. "In the long run we are all dead."
There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves.
But will either Cobol or C die out before Java?
Well Java Runtimes are built on C/C++ so maybe they will die together.
What I think is interesting has been the lack of a significant improvement in computer languages. We had 3rd generation procedural languages (Fortran, Pascal, Java), a fork off of OO languages (C++, SmallTalk, Java) which are more scalable than procedural languages, and the 4th generation AI style languages haven’t taken off.
Ok Java is not a procedural language, replace with C (Fortran, Pascal, C)
Gen 4 AI languages pave the way to Skynet. Fools.
The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
Java IS dead. Most of our code is now back to C. Thank God.
Is there any way to speed up the death of Java?
What can I do personally?
Java died before it even took off.
It was the accademics language, great for teching, great for writing simple little scripts, great for mobile phone games. But serious programing, i think not.
I think this quote says it all from the jcreator website “JCreator is written entirely in C++, which makes it fast and efficient compared to the Java based editors/IDE’s.”
Not even an IDE designed for java is writen in java, says alot about the language..
Signed – A disgruntled uni student that has a java exam in 2 hours..
Java is dead. How about this real world fact. I designed, documented and developed an application in VB
that took a month in a half. Later, a seasoned Java developer that works for the company converted my app to
Java, it took them A YEAR to convert my app. Now it’s slow, less automated, and buggy. Way to save money,
convert everything to Java, REAL smart! and that’s just the tip of the iceburg, let Java sink like the Titanic
Dr. X’s experience (a six week VB app. took a year to rewrite in
Java) has that ring of truth. I’ve been in CS since 1975 and I’m
just sick to death of the paradigm-a-holic OOPsters demanding
that the fastest way from Los Angeles to San Francisco is by
way of Denver.
Keep your damned 5,6,7-layered inheritance stacks away from
my code … PLEASE!!!! I’ll be leaving CS in a few years because
the stench of the code-bloaters and the feature-creepers is
choking my oxygen supply.
Even the C99 committee has added arcane garbage to the language.
Can anybody in CS leave well enough alone?? No. And the proof is
the coming of Perl 6 which will …. destroy and confuse the Perl
community. What they’re doing is like Kernighan changing an
assignment from = to := “just because it is OUR language”.
No wonder kids don’t want to major in CS. You have to read five
times more stuff than the Talmud just to become a middling
practitioner. This isn’t encouraging THINKING. It’s mindless rote.
It doesn’t leave enough leftover brain CPU power for THINKING.
It exhausts without enlivening.
CS … the self-destructive field.
John Perry
Wake up guys. Java is the most popular language. Check this out, http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
If Java is dead, what does it say about other languages which are less popularl? Someone claims ide
for java are not written in java. NetBeans, Eclipse and more recent versions of JBuilder are written in
Java.
wake up 2: java is already dead. Microsoft killed java with their dotnet stuff and now it is removed from all browsers as well. Never let a hardware company like sun design a software language. javascript is a completely different story. Javascript will outlive java
I’d wager that the assembly language will outlive most current languages.
Hmm, if Java is dead why’d I make $200k programming new apps last year?
dp shows a nice example of capitalizing on the “Long Tail” of Java.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLongTail
It’s only a matter of Java’s burn rate.
Unlike the liquid stock market where you can SELL NOW, Java has momentum due to huge it’s investment, pride, and ego.
I know this is an old thread, but…
@John Perry. I’m with you man. I constantly hear buzz words like scalable, robust, blah blah blah. With the new tech, I have to constantly keep up with things…not good enough to know the tech anymore, but now I have to know paradims about how to apply the tech, and if I don’t follow those paradims my code is now “ucky” to the hip hop herd of next gen programmers, even though typically my code works just as well as my “agile” counter parts, and somehow I get it done faster and follow on programmers can look at it and understand what I’m trying to do. I’m not against OOP and all (I use simple business and data objects all the time), but in web development ultimately we are taking data, storing data, and displaying data. We can make that as simple or as complex as we feel like. Me, I like to stick to KISS, but sometimes KISS programming doesn’t looks as good on a resume. And with the younger gen, it is a lot about hype and form over substance. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t brilliant younger programmers, there are, but I think programming has finally become main stream enough so that we suffer from fads.
Oh yeah, on Java, it was the right idea. Develop apps against a runtime instead of HTML in a browser. That we you have a full programming language with 100’s of prebuilt classes to help you along. Sounds like concepts behind Silverlight and Flex huh? Java was just batched, and M$ leveled its sights at Sun early on. So far the only company to stand against M$ is Apple, which is both a blessing and a curse.
I don’t see how you can say java is dead. Client side, applets etc maybe but server side its hugs. J2EE is massive – how many sites run on it still about 30% market share.
Why would i want to pay licenses for everything msoft when i can deploy a enterprise scale java based solution that can run on the linux i choose and not pay license fees.
The open source aspect and the size of the community is vast.
You only wish Java were dead. Everything that can be done with .Net can be done with (J2EE) Java at a licensing cost of $0. You can’t beat free my friend. Also, .Net lacks the enormous amount of open source libraries, projects, frameworks, etc, that are available in the Java world. Just take a look at the Apache site or SourceForge, they have APIs for even the weirdest task you can think of. .Net will never catchup to Java in this perspective, because the Micro$oft mindset in anti-open source. Java is driven by passion, .Net is driven by money. Passion always wins.
Java even offers you more to choose from in the IDE world. You want a “Fisher Price” looking IDE like Visual Studios, Java has Netbeans, you want something more advanced, use Eclipse or IntelliJ. You want an IDE that supports Perl, PHP, Ruby, and more, you can only find this in Netbeans and Eclipse. You want an IDE that has a slew of free plug-ins, you can only find this in Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ.
I have worked with .Net (C#) using Visual Studios, J2EE (Java) using Eclipse, Netbeans, and IntelliJ, and I can honestly tell you that I prefer Java. I base my decision on everything that I have mentioned above.
I noticed very few companies migrating from java to M$ regarding the enterprise side applications, beside that I hear big companies on my country(italy) migrated from M$ to Java, the choice was for license’s costs and having problems to gain support from M$ hosted application even if the paid for that.
oracle and jcp ????