It shocks me that a major company like Oracle would be so foolish as to make a statement like this. Stating that something is not is one of the most effective ways to imply that it is and the speaker knows it.
Edit: I remember reading this years ago and have been unable to track it down. Would love it if somebody did.
Another way to put it is that psychologically, a statement and its negation are not opposites but rather go together. The same idea comes up in hypnosis, where it is said that the unconscious mind drops the "not" and simply receives the images that are given. For the same reason, it's better to say "Remember" than "Don't forget", which is a kind of subliminal invitation to forget. And so on.
If Oracle's plan is to keep Java alive as a glue for their DB that strategy would work fine.
But it would be a long term disaster in terms of overall innovation, and long term viability for choosing everyday projects.
1. 'Hiring the cheap programmer' factor.
2. 'The Oracle' factor.
3. 'The pointy haired boss' factor.
I remember Bjarne Stroustrup telling Java isn't platform independent, Java is the platform. Meaning compiled C++ runs on processors directly, but compiled Java runs on JVM. So JVM becomes analogous to a processor.
So comparing JVM based languages is like comparing languages directly compiled to a processor like a ARM processor. Future of JVM is different than future of Java.
Just like future of C++ is different than future of pentium.
What about Android apps?
What about solid back-end?
What about Google AppEngine-Java?
People are still using Java for everyday projects and I don't see a disaster coming anytime soon.
Coming to Android and other Google initiative they tend to happen only because the tooling, documentation support and a large pool of programmers that exist.
Java today is not used because its awesome, its used because for a certain section of industry needs massive supply of low price programmers. And with Java the people, the tooling support and rest is already there.
Hence no doubt Java is the next COBOL.
Thank you for insulting Hadoop, Hbase, Cassandra, GWT commiters and developers at Google, Twitter, LinkedIN, and many more smart people who happened to choose Java.
Nice reply with no factual support.
By the way when given the choice its clear what the founders choose. Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose C++ and Python and Mark Zuckerberg chose Php. Twitter started out on Rails.
So its clear the Java mess seeps in only when the hackers are cleared from the scene and the layers of management begin to take control.
I don't even want to know how you came into these conclusions. They don't make any sense at all.
Java was 3 years old when Google started off. Did you get the link where one of the founders was asking question about Java back in 98 regarding web development? Did you know that Java has been used for many many years inside Google when these so called hackers were still working there?
Did you know that Twitter actually gets more stable when they migrated to Scala and Java? Did you check the presentation by Twitter engineer as to why they moved away? Those are technical presentations, not management business type of presentation. Are you suggesting that rails hackers were the culprit of all Twitter scalability iscsues?
I am unsure if we live in the same world mate.
The IDE removes that problem somewhat.
It's not that Java coders "can't write a line of code without an IDE", it's Java coders don't have the patience to write pure Java in a text editor.
You're also forgetting that a lot of enterprise applications consist of many many .java source files for each class. Trying to deal with all of that manually becomes a real headache
Intelligent people avoid headaches.
Prevention is better than cure. And IDE is a cure, Avoid what forces you to resort to a cure. Prevent the disease itself.
There's lots of old, conservative, slowly changing companies out there that have craploads of money and need (for certain meanings of the term) Oracle. Having control over Java gives them a lot more leverage in those markets, too.