Is Java Dying?

Sure it is. It has been tremendously popular for the last ten years, and that seems to have been the lifespan of popular languages like COBOL and C++. That it is dying has little to do with the language itself, but rather it's a product of the fact that no current programming language can create architecture that truly scales and maintains exceptions to its abstraction mechanisms without breaking.

Alan Kay said it best, "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

So what happens when you build a dog house out of cardboard and tape? Nothing. It works great. But build a house of that and it will be constantly falling apart.

What's happening now is that, after ten years, these systems have become so complex that they're not maintainable. People are noticing that their houses are falling apart. So they switch materials and start from the ground up and everything looks great at first, and the cycle starts again.

Java isn't dying, just evolving.