The Eschatology of Java

The Eschatology
of Java
Abdelmonaim Remani
@PolymathicCoder
@PolymathicCoder
Thursday, August 15, 13

License
Creative Commons Attribution Non-
Commercial License 3.0 Unported
The graphics and logos in this presentation
belong to their rightful owners
@PolymathicCoder

About Me
Platform Architect @ just.me Inc.
JavaOne RockStar and frequent speaker at many developer conferences and
events including JavaOne, JAX, OSCON, OREDEV, 33rd Degree, etc...
Open-source advocate and contributor
Active community member
The NorCal Java User Group
The Silicon Valley Dart Meetup
Etc...
Bio: http://about.me/PolymathicCoder
Twitter: @PolymathicCoder
Blog: http://blog.polymathiccoder.com
Email: abdelmonaim.remani@gmail.com
SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/PolymathicCoder
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This Talk
Based on an Article I published on:
JAX Magazine
August 2013 issue
http://jaxenter.com/jax-magazine/
@PolymathicCoder

This Talk
Structured in such a way that
Will simply walk you through my thought process as I
try to achieve some clarity and ﬁnd answers
Will hopefully not bore you to death
No predictive models, no numbers, no charts, no
ﬁgures, etc... (Totally overrated!)
Will attempt to keep you entertained throughout
Fun facts and a lot of cheesy humor
WYSIWYG
It’s all on the slides
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Pinky Promises
I am NOT promising
Any deﬁnitive answers
Any hard empirical evidence
All I am promising
My biased opinion mostly
More importantly the answer to the question:
Why do Java programmers wear glasses?
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You Be the Judge
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http://speakerscore.com/sfjug-futureofjava
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In the words of Duke...
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The Title?
es•cha•tol•o•gy
The “[...] part of theology, philosophy, and
futurology concerned with what is believed to be
the ﬁnal events of history, the ultimate destiny
of humanity - commonly referred to as the “end
of the world” or “end of time” -Wikipedia
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What is
the Future of
Java?
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The Java Late-Night
Talk Show
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What is the Future of
Java?
What/Who
decides the fate of
Java?
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The Pundits
of the Blogosphere
The Eggheads & the Romantics
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The Eggheads
The supported features will decide the future of Java
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The Egghead Bash
Argue over
Wether the most recent feature is good or
bad
What should the next feature to be added
They never agree on anything
The egghead bias
The current hype
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The song has the asymptotic complexity of O(log n)
“The Complexity of Songs” -Donald E. Knuth (1977)
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/arvindn/misc/knuth_song_complexity.pdf
http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/
99 Bottles of Beer
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99 Bottles of Beer written in Piet, an esoteric programming language
http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html
99 Bottles of Beer
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The Egghead Bash
More features is not always good idea
Features that are impossible to implement
Features that are not consistent with the
philosophy that drove the initial design of
the language
Is the change genuinely needed?
Is the change arguably in the right direction?
@PolymathicCoder

The Egghead Bash
The hype around a competing technology
The new kid on the block
The “hottest” Programming Language
The latest and greatest set of features at some
point in time
The old dog
The “hot-enough” Programming Language
The set of features that fulﬁll the needs of the
general use-case at some point in time
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The Egghead Bash
Fad or no-fad?
Will people abandon the old dog for the new kid on the block?
Programming Language Inertia
“Hot-enough” tends to stay relevant
Hotness
A tipping point or critical “Hotness Differential” where the
new “hot” is so “hot” it renders the old “hot-enough” “unhot”
What’s up with Java?
Certainly not the “hottest”, but “hot-enough”
There isn’t anything out there approaching the tipping point in
a serious way
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The Romantics
The community will decide the future of Java
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The Community
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TIOBE Index
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
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The Romantic Bash
The chicken-or-egg causality dilemma
The relationship between viability of a
programming language and the health of
its community is a correlation at best not
causality
A healthy community only indicates
current success, but doesn’t say much
about the future success
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“The Grey Area”
Argument
The features & community
will decide the future of Java
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Maybe Neither of Them
Decide...
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Programming
Language Darwinism
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Biological Darwinism
Develop a logical argument from the
analogy drawn between the Darwinian
theory of evolution of species and the
evolution of programming languages
The concepts from evolutionary biology
that are relevant to our analogical
inference include: Survival of the ﬁttest,
and the existence of the common ancestor
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The Voyage of the
Beagle
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life” -Charles Darwin (1859)
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Darwin’s Finches
What causes the ﬁnches living the individual islands of
the Galapagos Archipelago to be different from one
another?
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Evolution by Natural
Selection
Species are not immutable
The environment establishes a bias towards certain traits and against other
ones
The fortunate organisms that possess the favored traits thrive, whereas the
unfortunate ones that possess the unfavored traits die off
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Further Reading
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Programming Languages
Darwinism
What would the theory of “The Evolution of Programming
Languages by Means of Natural Selection” be?
If programming languages were to be finch species
The beak forms of the individual finch species would be
the feature sets supported by the individual
programming languages
The population of the individual finch species would be
the community around the the individual programming
languages
But, what would the environment of the individual finch
species be analogous to?
@PolymathicCoder

Darwinism
Defining the environment to the individual finch species as
The specific island of the Galapagos Archipelago it lives on
The kind of available food on its specific island
We draw the following analogy about the environment within the
context of the individual programming language as follows
The specific island of the Galapagos Archipelago would be the
specific hardware architecture on top of which the binaries of
the compiled individual programming language artifacts are
executed
The kind available food to the finch species would be the
problem space of the individual programming language (the
kind of software to be written using the individual
programming language)
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Darwinism
Biological Evolution Programming-Language Evolution
The Finch Species The Programming Language
The Finch Population The community
The Beak Form The Supported Feature Set
The Kind of Available Food The Problem Space
The Island The Underlying Hardware
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The environment
decides the fate
of programming languages
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The Java Finch
Java has been successful because it is well-ﬁtted
to write currently needed software on currently
available hardware
It is reasonable to assume that it will continue
to be successful as long as the environment
stays unchanged
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Darwinism
http://oreilly.com/news/graphics/prog_lang_poster.pdf
The Common Ancestor Question?
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To answer the question:
What is the future of Java?
we should answer questions:
Are there any significant environmental changes?
How do these changes, if any, affect Java?
Are they gonna make Java less fitted or more fitted?
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The Real Java Finch
Juggy, The Java Finch
A Java User Group mascot
Created by Bruno Souza, Founder of
SouJava (Java User Society)
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Environmental Change?
The Hardware We Depend On
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Moore’s Law
The number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately
every two years
“Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” -Moore (1965)
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~fussell/courses/cs352h/papers/moore.pdf
The performance gain is automatically realized by the software
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Gordon E. Moore, Co-Founder of Intel
The Legendary Mr. Moore
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The Legendary Mr. Moore
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Moore’s Law
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The End of Moore’s Law
“Reality hits you hard bro!”
-George Lindell
The Laws of Thermodynamics and Quantum
Mechanics limit the computing power of the
one silicon-chip (Heat & Leakage
constraints)
The era of the multi-core chip
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The Imperative
Programming Paradigm
Dominant and intuitive
Java is an imperative programming language
Computational instructions are expressed as sequences of statements with the
side-effect of mutating state
Managing state is the responsibility of developers
Parallelism
One single-core chip
State mutation and access needs be synchronized among concurrently
executing threads. Not as simple as it sounds!
One multi-core chip
State mutation and access needs be synchronized among concurrently
executing threads across multiple cores
Good luck! Most end up writing software that does not take advantage of
all core
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Ada is the world’s ﬁrst computer programmer
Known for her work on the Analytical Engine, the
ﬁrst programmable general-purpose computer
invented Charles Babbage, the father of the computer
The Analytical Engine
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The Analytical Engine
“It must be evident how multifarious and how
mutually complicated are the considerations which
the working of such an engine involve. There are
frequently several distinct sets of effects going on
simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each
other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising
a mutual inﬂuence. To adjust each to every other,
and indeed even to perceive and trace them out with
perfect correctness and success, entails difﬁculties
whose nature partakes to a certain extent of those
involved in every question where conditions are
very numerous and inter-complicated” - Note D
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The Paradigm is Shifting
All imperative programming languages are
doomed to extinction
Java is no exception!
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The New Sheriff in Town
The Functional Programming Paradigm
Oh yeah... Lisp is back!
with a posse: Scala, Clojure, etc...
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When Pigs Fly
Java, the language
Functional Java?
It’s only a matter of time before it becomes COBOL
Java, the platform (The JVM)
Functional Programming Languages on the JVM
The Da Vinci Project (JSR 292)
“The legacy of Java will be the platform, not the language” -Martin
Fowler
I recommend reading Neal Ford’s “Java.next” series on developerWorks
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/java/libraryview.jsp?
search_by=java+next:
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Not so bad...
At least the JVM is gonna make it
Turned out to be a lot more than
“Write once, run anywhere”
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Environmental Change?
The Software We Write
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The Omnivorous Finch
As a generic
programming
language, Java has
proven itself suited
for almost every
use case
WTF!!!
There are no
Omnivorous
ﬁnches!
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Nephologia
JEE, the de facto standard of the enterprise applications
Addresses the needs of the most complex requirements
Matured an impressive technology stack and a number well-deﬁned
and standardized APIs
The impact of “Social”
The line between enterprise applications and consumer applications
is blurred
While other platforms continue to struggle, Java continues to thrives
Lightweight JEE 5 with a focus on developer productivity
Cloud computing and the emergence of PAAS
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It’s all good news...
Server-side Java is up on cloud
number 9
Sounds like Java ain’t going nowhere!
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The Mobile Space
Plagued by fragmentation, constrained hardware,
and scarce data connectivity only JME could
provide a programming model that unites all
An explosion of smarter and innovative devices
No Java phone
Spread so thin, JME failed to fulﬁll the
promise of “Write once, run anywhere”
Early JavaFX failed as much (Today’s JavaFX is
signiﬁcantly different)
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Android on a White Horse
The best thing that happened to Java?
Filled the void left by deﬁcient JME
and JavaFX
Gave Java a much needed
rejuvenating jolt
Introduced it to a wider audience
Made it cool again
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Android
Only if you happen to believe that Android is
Java
Java classes are compiled into a binary
that is nothing like the Java byte code
Executed on Dalvik, a VM that is nothing
like the standard JVM
Java standard class library is not fully
supported or implemented in a way that is
counter-intuitive to the Java SE developer
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The Wolf
in Sheep Clothing
Android is NOT good for Java in the long term
Considering the paradigm shift, nothing is endangering
the future of Java as a platform more than Android
It gutted the soul of Java by opting for Dalvik instead of
the JVM, and reduced it down to the syntax language
Java is good for Android
Google free loaded on the goodwill of most popular
programming language Java
How much success would Android have Google pushed
for Go or Dart instead?
How much choice did Google actually have?
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iOS
How many love Objective-C?
Java on iOS?
No JVM on iOS
Apple keep a tight lid on it
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The Workaround
Ship the JVM with the app
Gosling suggested that the new JEP
178 (JDK Enhancement Proposal) will
allow shipping the runtime, native app
code, and Java code in single binary
without the need of shared libraries
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239658/Computer_scientists_oppose_Oracle_39_s_bid_to_copyright_Java_APIs
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Not So Fast!
There are some concerns
The size of the ﬁnal shippable app
Project Jigsaw (JSR 337) is still
dragging
Apple’s App Store terms and conditions
are subject to change at anytime
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The Real Challenge
Writing apps of comparable quality to native iOS apps
JavaFX Will need support for
iOS controls and look and feel consistent
with Apple’s guidelines
Apple’s hardware
JavaFX brings in outstanding performance in
handling audio, video, graphics, and animation
According to Gosling “The JIT code
generator has to be turned off”
Better off using PhoneGap-like technologies
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The state of mobile Java is very
concerning
The biggest fear is the day where
“Write once, run nowhere”
becomes reality
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The Elephants
in the Room
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Vulnerabilities
It is the end of the world... Disable insecure Java!
S#!t happens!
Show me a technology that has no security issues
It mostly affected the Java browser plugin
Only 5.5% of browsers were running the patched version as of
March 25th, 2013
Drawing the line of responsibility
Developers’ vs. Oracle’s
If you are still writing Java Applets in 2013, the chicken have
come home to roost
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Titanomachy
Oracle America, Inc. vs. Google Inc.
The Java APIs are non-copyrightable because they are
functional in nature and are required by others to use
the Java language
https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/3--10-cv-03561/Oracle_America_Inc._v._Google_Inc./1190/
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An Extract from the
Article
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“This is one of those questions better asked to a palm
reader in the old souks of Marrakech, or a gypsy fortune-
teller in the streets of Stolipinovo.
Now, you can spend your time reading into the visible
exhalation of vapor rising from that steamy cup of Java,
asking yourself "Is it really as hot as it seems to be? Or is
the temperature of the room just too low?"
I say... take a sip before it gets too cold to drink when all the
vapor there is to be is diffused through the air. We all know
it's been there long enough not to burn your tongue.”
- The Eschatology of Java by Abdelmonaim Remani

JAX Magazine
August 2013 issue
http://jaxenter.com/jax-magazine/
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Questions/Comments
@PolymathicCoder

Why do Java Programmers
wear glasses?
Because they don’t C#!
-Courtesy of @ProgrammingCom
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Thank You
@PolymathicCoder
http://speakerscore.com/sfjug-futureofjava
http://blog.polymathiccoder.com
@PolymathicCoder

The Eschatology of Java

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The Eschatology of Java