Java recently lost the ‘most popular language’ crown. Is it still cool? Are challenger languages like Go stealing its mojo? We’ll discuss why perceptions of Java might be shifting and reasons to be hopeful about its future.

1. Java vs Challenger
Languages
Ryan Dawson Mauricio Salatino
@Seldon_IO @ZeebeHQ
LJC

2. Is Java Losing Its Mojo?
- Head to head Stats
- Challenger Languages
- Jitters about Oracle
- Concerns about Bloat
- Cloud: Memory and Cold Starts
- Java is Changing
- Interpreting The Trends
- Java has an image problem

3. H2H Stats
Java remains ahead in TIOBE index
By PYPL measure of google searches Python recently overtook Java
GitHub has Java third to JavaScript and Python
The whole market is growing but Java’s market share isn’t

4. TIOBE index

5. GitHub

6. Job Market

7. Stackoverflow
SO survey ranking 2019
(Java was down one from 2018)

8. Languages of teaching

9. Challenger Languages
JavaScript
Python
Go?
Scala? Kotlin? A family feud?

10. Oracle Acquisition
This gets cited as a problem for Java
Alleged ‘commercialisation’
Perhaps people have bad memories of Java EE
But the language had kinda stagnated and now it is moving again

11. The Bloat Objection
Java’s ecosystem has a lot of legacy
This can be overwhelming

12. The tool chain is big

13. But are others better?

15. Hard to debug?
Spring can be tricky
But are alternatives really better?

16. Cloud: Memory and Cold Starts
There are problems here
But there’s progress. Newer Java releases and GraalVM

17. GraalVM - Memory

18. GraalVM - coldstart

19. Java is Changing

20. Streams

21. Reactive

22. Interpreting the Trends
What are people using the challenger languages for?
JavaScript - UI
Python - data science, ML and scripting
C - IoT/embedded
Go - systems programming/devops
But each is also a general-purpose language. So there’s spillover to building web
backends.

23. Why spillover
There’s a grey area between types of app.
Some apps may be general-purpose webapps with a bit of data analytics. Then
python could be compelling. Or with a bit of low-level k8s interaction - then golang
could be compelling.
And if you as a developer mostly do data analytics or mostly UI and then you find
yourself needing to make a backend for a general-purpose web app then you
don’t want to learn a new language.

24. The Image Problem
Java isn’t cool anymore

25. Front ends are cool

26. Sort of

28. And DevOps

29. And Cloud

30. Reasons to be positive
New releases every 6 months
New stuff like reactive and streams and GraalVM
Maturity and skills pool matter a lot for big projects
Spring Boot is awesome
Java is very good for domain modeling and business logic