Man I was frustrated by this article. Despite it being on a subject matter I normally ignore, it lured me in with the promise to “dig into data publicly in a way that (so far) I haven’t seen anyone else do”.

I was expecting some novel analysis of in depth data scraped from GitHub APIs, or the results of a qualitative survey of big Java shops, or … something?

Instead what we got was a reposting of a few surface level stats pulled from other blog posts which have tolled the death of Java (or C++ or whatever) ad nauseum.

It’s as if the author started with a narrative and went searching for the line plots to justify it.

To be clear I don’t doubt the growth of Java amongst new learners is slowing down. Partly perhaps due to an image problem relative to other new languages, but likely also due to having somewhat saturated its “total addressable market” and not repositioning itself in new “markets” in the way that, say python has done.

But it’s still a great language for many categories of problem (e.g. high throughput live service) and has rich ecosystem. Build what you like with whatever tool is good for the job. Stop using bad stats to motivate your recent learning choices and just go build stuff :-)