Manni Wood

Stephan Schmidt’s Is Java Dead? is a perceptive look at how Java is not dead, but how it is nonetheless not the only language one might want to start a new project in.

Five years ago, it would have been easy to pick a language to specialise in: Java, hands down.

But, with popular web sites being built in technologies like C#, Ruby, Python, and PHP, job postings are no longer Java only. Java still seems to dominate, but many other languages are nipping at its heels.

One of the reasons I got so deep into Python is that Google uses a lot of Python. With their work on unladen-swallow, and Python 3’s use of UTF-8 as the default character set, the future of Python seems to be one of better performance and better internationalisation (two things Java currently does quite well). Oh: and Guido Van Rossum works at Google, so I’d say that’s quite an endorsement of Python over at the search giant.

There’s been a lot of research into JVMs lately (LLVM, Parrot), but I think Stephen Schmidt is on to something when he says that whereas Java might become less popular, the JVM might remain so. The next language that gets accepted into the enterprise might be JVM-based, making in harder for non-JVM languages to gain traction. In fact, languages like Clojure, that run on the JVM and even call back into Java, may be the ones with the brightest future. (Schmidt would choose Scala for his next project.)

So this is a strike against Python, but conversely a plus for Jython, which seems to be in active development.

It’s definitely a good time to be interested in picking up a new language, though. As Schmidt says:

But just because Java is not dead doesn’t mean it has a future. Developers need to open their eyes and learn new languages. I’m really disappointed in interviews when candidates show no interest in programming beside Java.

It would be so much easier if there was a clear successor to Java, the way Java seemed to just clobber Perl/CGI for web programming. (Though I’m certain that history looks different to the PHP crowd, so a shout-out to all of you.)

This time, there is no clear successor. But, learning a new language (any language) is probably a good idea right about now. So even if my investment in Python doesn’t pay the dividends I’d hoped (and I really do like Python), and Python doesn’t get traction outside of Google, I’m still glad I learned it. That’s an investment in itself.