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Comment by smarx007 | Hacker News Reader

> I always hoped Java would make a comeback

In order to make a comeback, Java first needs to fall from the TOP 3 languages used by professional programmers in the world.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

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These insights are a snapshot, not a trend line. Java can be in rapid decline and still be at the top of the list. Changing acceleration, not position, is how you make a comeback.

Java is currently losing Android devs to Kotlin. That could cause a precipitous drop in direct usage in the coming years.

Despite some surface differences, Kotlin and Java are so similar that "losing" one to the other isn't really that big a change. They run on the same platforms and they use the same frameworks, dependencies, debuggers, and other tooling.

A Java developer will pick up Kotlin much faster than, say, a Postgres developer will pick up Mongo. It takes a lot longer for a Java programmer to learn the Android environment than the Kotlin language.

If there were a trend from Java towards Rust or Go or Python, that would be a significant change in the world. If Java were to vanish tomorrow and everybody had to pick up Kotlin, the world would be pretty much the same in a week. Kotlin is nice, benefitting from a clean-sheet implementation of lessons that Java takes on only with difficulty, but it's not a wholesale break.

There's no such thing as Postgres or Mongo developer. They are not programming languages.

They are tools used by programmers. They do, in fact, have languages of their own, but more to the point they have whole ecosystems of expected behaviors, idioms, best practices, etc etc etc. Those take longer to learn than a programming language.

Similarly, "web app" isn't a programming language, and neither is "server side". But they are toolkits that a developer must learn on top of their programming language, and it takes longer than the actual language itself.

> There's no such thing as Postgres or Mongo developer.

That's very much not true. I've personally done contracts for developing PostgreSQL related code and/or PostgreSQL based projects.

PL/pgSQL says otherwise

That's a DSL, not a programming language.

What, pray tell, do you think the "L" in "DSL" represents?

Same as "L" in "HTML". Does that make XML a programming language?

My point is - DSL and programming language can overlap. However they don't have to.

I would argue that XML is a non-turing complete declarative programming language.

Daemon Specific Logos might be found in the appendix of the Inquisitor's Guide.

Language, not programming language ;-)

True, but I don't think Java is declining, I just think Python and JavaScript grew beyond Java. But I really doubt that the use of JavaScript and Python that took on replaced the use of Java, I think it's just new use cases. I haven't looked at the data, but ya, I'd doubt Java is declining.

P.S.: Also I say Java, but I mean JVM, I club all JVM languages together, since that's more what I care about, is the strength of the Java ecosystem.

And in the cloud native world everything is on the Go track. Java were huge for big enterprise monoliths, but it seems like this is not what we are heading for in the future.

There is work being done for native (AOT) Java deployments.

True, but Go is far ahead in this important domain and it is an open question whether Java can catch up.

Java has AOT compiler support since around 2000, 20 years, Go should take care to catch up with generics instead.

It just wasn't available as free beer, so it tends to be ignored by the FOSS crowds.

Java is nowhere close losing the #1/2 spot in programming language, it's just everywhere.

It's already #3 according to some rankings out there, behind JavaScript and Python. It's growth that will be the deciding factor.

I agree that Java is not going anywhere, but I could absolutely see a world where JavaScript and Python are number one and two.

According to that Stack Overflow survey, JavaScript and Python are currently number one and two respectively.

After Excel

Ya, but the ranking don't really matter, the usage does. It's possible Java grew year over year and yet lost rank.

I certainly agree that language rankings don’t really matter. In very broad strokes, “used everywhere,” “used many places,” “used some places,” “pretty niche,” “academic only,” these kinds of things are more useful than arguing which is 5 vs 6.

Well on GitHub this is already the case since quite some time.

Exactly. Sometimes it takes more developers to maintain code than to initially implement it, which means technology choices today may lead to bigger popularity trends down the road.

/cries in old code

In the same way Rust appears in ... (5,1% - 4.8% Professional Developers). The big players are looking for commercial long term safety about the used tools, platforms, programming languages and their ecosystems. After that, the technical discussion will take place.

I'm not sure who "the big players" are in your book but the largest software engineering organizations in the world are already using Rust. The post is about one of them committing their resources to the project itself.

Caution doesn't make money, it just prevents losing as much money. When it comes to technology if you're waiting for everyone else to validate an idea, you're too late.

"...the largest software engineering organizations in the world are already using Rust ...", and also for a long long time have been using Java, JavaScript, SQL, and much more programming languages. ¿It's only about new (and better) ways to develop software or can also be 'cool' to interfere in the evolution of the programming language that you plan to use for the next years ? I 'm not against to use Rust or any other programming language, open source project or technology. I mean, the companies love open source projects because they can produce their self flavor as a product (search engine, linux distro, containers and orchestration technologies, etc.) when they wish that, without worries about uncomfortable dependencies.

AWS loves Rust in the same way than Facebook loved PHP.

No not at all but even if that we’re the case fb taking an interest spurred PHP from a legacy language back into a living language that’s growing in features.

> the largest software engineering organizations in the world are already using Rust.

That doesn't mean much because it is true for probably most serious technologies out there. Most of those organizations also have a perl script somewhere. Does that mean their core products are written in perl? Nope.

That being said, Rust is certainly successful and seeing growing adoption.

This isn't just anecdotal usage, we've seen plenty of Rust blog posts, job offers and opensource releases from these companies.

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