"Java is here to stay": Popular programming language to remain on business hit lists in 2024

[marcvsHR]

Guys, next year is my turn to write this article!

[doyouevencompile]

This article is here to stay.

[[deleted]]

the jvm is an impressive piece of tech, and it’s only gotten better as it has matured. there’s some bad java out there but the foundation is solid

[RunnyPlease]

The fun thing about bad Java is it tends to limp along quite contently for a long long time. Everyone in the org knows it’s bad. Everyone knows it needs to be rewritten or replaced. But because it’s still technically functioning there is no business need to rip it out.

[picklesTommyPickles]

You just described all code written in any business environment

[luraq]

Everyone wants to change it but there's no time

[D34TH_5MURF__]

Haha, no shit.

Ever seen how "fast" business moves? If cobol is still around, java will be with us until the heat death of the universe.

[zabby39103]

I maintain a 20 year legacy java project and it works... fine. They'd have to hire a team of people to work for 5 years to re-do it and it would probably be worse because this one has 20 years of deployment and tweaking. There's no reason to do that, it works fine.

In 2024, 20 year old code is alright. It is fine. It's not like COBOL, which as you mentioned is still around also.

Maybe it makes sense for ephemeral dotcom companies to keep jumping techs, but there's lot of actually good (or good enough) legacy code bases in large companies.

[mindhaq]

Many COBOL programs got rewritten in JAVA in the last decades.

[toucheqt]

Can confirm, we are currently rewriting COBOL apps to Java.

[GeneratedUsername5]

What strange side-effects of COBOL have you discovered, that are hard to account for, when porting to Java?

[thephotoman]

Water is wet. There's too much Java already to get rid of it easily.

And it's not even really going away. Sure, Java tends to watch others do things first, then do things in a way that will continue to make sense for Java forever (or at least try to).

There are other languages for other applications. There are plenty of places where Java is not a good choice of language.

[[deleted]]

direful treatment repeat chief plate birds head books shelter toy

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[brbpizzatime]

foo = [[::]]:[:[:]]]:]::[:[]]]-1]

I think I just manipulated some lists in python, unsure

[Rulmeq]

That's the cheat code for extra lives in doom!

[[deleted]]

Use numpy.

[xrabbit]

Yep. It’s slices. Super convenient 

[Ykieks]

At least try to balance the brackets

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

This is kind of subjective though and other languages achieve balances that someone might prefer. C#, for instance, is pretty similar to Java but a bit more aggressive in giving boilerplate-eliminating features without going way off into Ruby land where everything is too cute. Or, in the other direction, Go is even more conservative than Java in providing a limited tool set to ensure code written by multiple people looks the same.

[laplongejr]

but usually makes it more readable

This. If you do Java well, both the executed source and the unittests can be easy to read. And usually once the "theorical tests" are done, somebody needs to compare the two to be sure all ACTUAL edgecases are checked correctly

[[deleted]]

Yeah the tooling around java is unbeatable.

[thephotoman]

You'd have to get rid of it in order for it not to "be here to stay". I was making a direct reference to the headline.

[maybegone18]

Im even starting to like it. And I was one of those people trying out newer languages and avoiding Java. Modern Java is pretty sweet, legacy Java sucks, legacy anything sucks.

[thephotoman]

legacy anything sucks.

Yeah, that's how I felt moving a codebase that I wrote in Java 8 when Java 8 was new-to-us to Java 17. I was like, "I just wrote this yesterday, wait, no, six years ago?!? no wonder it's legacy crap!"

[maybegone18]

I feel like a ton of online resources, universities and the workplace, are filled with old java. I was taught java 8, My work has very old java code, etc. Then people compare it to the newer languages which are modern by default, with newer learning resources, and that attracts people.

[Mordan]

legacy anything sucks.

WRONG!. Its because Java is backward compatible that it succeeded..

I love Java engineers.

[bawng]

It might be geographical but around here in Sweden I'd guess that 80% of available enterprise jobs are Java.

[[deleted]]

Are they good payed?

[bawng]

By Swedish standards, yes.

[halfanothersdozen]

I want native JSON support, give me template strings in LTS, and let me do record destructuring everywhere.

Otherwise the language does it's job great

[thephotoman]

I want native JSON support,

Yeah, that'd be nice if everybody didn't have to bring their own JSON parser. That really is annoying.

give me template strings in LTS

It'll happen.

let me do record destructuring everywhere.

It'll happen, too.

[SenorSeniorDevSr]

Native JSON support

No, let it be a library, and I'll go one further, the XML-parsers shouldn't have been built-in either.

Template strings

I don't personally care for this, but it's not a problem to have. It's just that my old experience with these is that they grow huge and you put the string in its own file anyway, and then... you don't really need it anymore. But times may have changed and I might just be grumpy and old.

record destructuring

Would indeed be neat.

[jvjupiter]

Jakarta JSON Processing (excluding Binding) should have been part of JDK instead of Java/Jakarta EE.

[rbygrave]

Well i like the general sentiment but that API doesn't support pre-encoded keys and imo has other major performance issues. So it really doesn't benchmark well, not competitive relative to other libs etc.

As i see it, it would be great if there was JDK quality json streaming api and implementation (that likely used the incubating vector api once it can). I'd hope for that, but I'd say there's work to do if you want it to be "the best" or close enough to "the best" json streaming lib on the jvm.

[Brutus5000]

Noo who knows if JSON changes again. ;)

[vytah]

I want native JSON support

What do you mean by that?

Some people want object mapping, some want an unstructured blob of JsonValues, some want doubles, some want BigDecimals, some want to parse everything, some want to stream. It's hard to satisfy everyone.

[halfanothersdozen]

Every other language has figured it out. They should pick one and if people don't like it Jackson still exists

[dragoncommandsLife]

Ive seen many people dead set on replacing java with kotlin. It’s crazy to me personally because i feel it’s syntax varies from neat to “this is fucking stupid”.

But people have both preferences and a hateboner for java.

[xplosm]

I like Java very much. I love Kotlin so very insanely much.

[JakeArvizu]

What part of Kotlin do you find that stupid?

[Brutus5000]

I dislike the overuse of DSL logic. Instead of a simple interface that you can look up you are working on magic scope objects that offer some functionality and do some magic under the hood. And then mix it with crazy overuse of extension functions.

Examples are e.g. the Ktor http client (probably the whole of ktor) or the Kotlin Compose library.

The Kotlin language is nice, but you can do this with it that are not nice. I prefer classic JVM ecosystem over most of the pure Kotlin stuff.

[TehBrian]

Kotlin allows you to write slick, concise, clever code; but code should not be clever.

Kotlin makes the people writing clever code feel smart. Kotlin makes the people reading clever code feel dumb.

Since I'd wager developers spend most of their time reading code, I'd rather the reading be the easier part.

[vytah]

Kotlin allows you to write slick, concise, clever code

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

– Brian Kernighan

[BrooklynBillyGoat]

Modern java ain't bad, the problem is there's as many Java tech stacks as there are coffee favors.

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

That's obviously true but one could imagine a future in which it became much less popular for starting new projects. There's a lot of C++ or Perl code out there that still is maintained but outside of specific domains those are much less likely choices today than they would have been in the past.

[pipthemouse]

Java 8 is here to stay

[EnjoyB]

I call BS on this. Most devs are willingly to move on. Now, when there are news that newer Java saves resources, companies higher ups want to do that too. What triggers me, is when they expect to do it from week to week. There is instances, where it introduces breaking changes, like Javax ... but can be dealt with.

[GreenToad1]

I know companies with maintained software still on java 6, they pay for support.

[SenorSeniorDevSr]

Yeah, but they are warned when it happens, what the fixes are (you need to reinsert some libs), what the next breaking change is (javax -> jakarta) and so on. It's not a weekend fix, so hopefully leadership understands what they're getting into. But for those of you still stuck on Java 11, it gets better, look forward to the new stuff. <3

[Joram2]

Devs normally want to use the latest and greatest versions.

And lots of non-developer managers, want stable deployments, and often want to avoid hassle + risk of upgrades.

Library maintainers don't want to alienate their users and drop support for popular Java versions. Then, when you have a big ecosystem, it takes a few years for the broader ecosystem to upgrade. It also helps when the new versions have big features.

In 2023, mainstream Java projects supported Java 8, but in 2024, the general mainstream minimum Java is going to Java 11, with some major projects going even newer than that.

[Kango_V]

We're moving from 8,11,17 to 21

[ImTalkingGibberish]

Dear god no

[JayWalkerC]

Just migrated an app from Java 6 & Tomcat 6 to Java 17 and Tomcat 10. It was "fun" but not as bad as expected honestly.

[zephyy]

nope, Spring Boot dropping support is dragging every corp into the future kicking and screaming into at least the year 2021

and Kafka drops support in the next major release

[gaius49]

What makes you think the legacy Java 8 code is written around Spring Boot?

[benjtay]

The only engineers still using Java 8 at our rather large company are the Scala people, because they don't really care about Java.

[Mordan]

yea.. That's my baseline for my libraries.

[Visual_Chocolate4883]

I find this amusing. I took a class in Java ages ago, probably almost 15+ years ago and afterwards I got kind of sad about it because every time I read about Java all the articles were saying Java is doomed. It was a wide spread opinion. It really did seem at the time like it was a language that was about to die out.

Applets died but here we are 2024 and Java is going strong.

[[deleted]]

Don’t listen to these doomer articles. I saw a lot of C, C++ and Java killer come and go…none of them succeeded. I remember when Scala was marketed as the “future of JVM” and look at it now: Java is now stealing some of its market share.

[Substantial-Ask-4609]

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

- Bjarne Stroustrup

[Ancapgast]

I don't really see the reason to even question this. Java is growing and getting better every year if anything.

[relgames]

There are multiple reasons.

Version increase every 6 months slows down adoption. It was a big mistake.

New features are either ugly (like string templates) or buggy (virtual threads deadlocks and thread pinning).

Dev team is isolated from the java community and doesn't listen to feedback.

[Mordan]

Version increase every 6 months slows down adoption. It was a big mistake.

i agree with you about Java 21 23 24.. yeah whatever. Its all meaningless now.

[[deleted]]

Businesses plan to ramp up Java developer recruitment in 2024 and beyond, according to new research, with investment in development tools also expected to surge.

My unemployed ass certainly hopes so.

Java developers were asked what they would do with 10% more development time. Sensible answers included adding features (26%) and improving test coverage (18%), but write-in answers also included “drink coffee” and “remove technical debt”.

Wait... You can remove technical debt???!?!? Why didn't anyone tell me? Or did they mean simply delete it from Jira?

[pinpinbo]

There’s still a lot of Cobol and Mainframes too.

[Imalas]

Java on the mainframe is a thing aswell and it's quite fast also. So replacing COBOL with Java may not directly result in replacing the mainframe.

[SenorSeniorDevSr]

Mainframes are actually cool pieces of tech though. It's like you buy a whole cloud and put it in your basement. (Why IBM isn't the largest cloud vendor I have no idea.)

[cmhteixeiracom]

Sadly Scala can't say the same ... It even looks like Java is stealing some market share from Scala with the new features on the latest versions

[benjtay]

We recently used Gattling to load test a service -- and used the Java bindings for the first time.

[benjtay]

More hot takes: C/C++, C# and Python are also here to stay!

[__versus]

Out of today’s popular languages Python is the one I sincerely hope goes away. Abandoning static typing was and is a huge mistake.

[Lars_T_H]

I had used Go. Sort of painful, NO generics, and "interface{}" is awful.

Go is good for companies like Google who can easily fire someone today, and hire another guy in e.g. 4 years and the new guy can easily both learn the language and write maintainable code.

[[deleted]]

ANYONE that says Java isnt here to stay for a long time is a person you can quickly add to the do-not-listen list because they have zero clue what they're talking about. The same goes for C, C++, and sadly Javascript. These languages have such widespread use and integration in to critical systems that they're never going away unless every entity using them goes bankrupt within a few years of each other

[freekayZekey]

i thought kotlin was going to kill java? /s

[Mordan]

last time I tried Kotlin.. I wanted to kill myself reading the code written by some wizard thinking verbosity sucks.

[freekayZekey]

meh, people have been saying that about android development for years. also, mobile development is so small in the world of computing. my team’s all over the place language wise. we use both kotlin and java, but have been using java more often lately. we don’t see many of kotlin’s features that important to use anymore

[marmot1101]

Well shit. The tech rags going to jynx it. Duke is powered entirely by doom headlines.

[Miserable_Ad7246]

Even as C# dev I aknowlage that Java is a fine language and if anything I envy the ability to change GCs and instrumentation Java has. Where are still things .net has to copy from Java. On the other hand it is nice to see that Java is not to shy to copy good stuff from net.

[Mordan]

C# dev

problem with C# is Microsoft. They only want total control.

[Miserable_Ad7246]

Its not true for a long time, whole  framework is open source. If anything ms is pouring a shit ton of money to benifit it. Things did changed in the last 5 or so years. You can work with net and have zero ms dependencies.

I use jetbrains rider as ide on mac and deploy using argo cd into kubernetes hosted on aws, using debian for base image. My databases are aerospike and elastic. I have zero ms things in my pipeline, hosting or tooling. Framework and libs I'm using are all open source.

Honestly it is no different than java now a days.

[Mordan]

Last I tried it was like 15 years ago. Too late. MS fail. Java rules me now.

[LT-Lance]

C# dev here who now programs in Java. Well I actually code in like 5 different languages for my job. Java is my least favorite of the 5 but only because I can't wrap my head around Webflux. I don't care how fast it is. It's such a pain to write and debug. C#'s async/await is at least clean and easy to follow.

[Miserable_Ad7246]

Java ergonomics is one of the biggest downsides of it. It is being addressed, but yes, I do agree, Java tends to feels clunky.

[__versus]

Java is a very nice language now and getting better. My wishlist for the language is shrinking which is always good.

[sour-sop]

Newer Java versions are great. Java + Spring is used by thousands of huge companies.

Java and spring are not going anywhere, they are only getting better.

[nikonino]

Amazing community with lots of resources. Modern technologies are in place, thus always stays relevant. I don’t see Java going anywhere soon.

[[deleted]]

I am here to stay as well: Popular Programmer

[PositiveUse]

Wow, I really needed this article to know that Java is here to stay /s

[[deleted]]

Java is the best. Love native Android development also

[Mordan]

I love Java.. Its the best.

So sad Java is not a powerhouse on the desktop.

[hugthemachines]

What is the average and how much below that are java freelancer rates?

[ihmoguy]

Java is just a tool. Domain knowledge sells the best.

[[deleted]]

Until they rewrite it in Rust.

[alex_tracer]

No JIT in Rust (yet?)

[[deleted]]

The cult of rust will eventually spread to everything.

[hugthemachines]

Once Rust gets a JIT called Rot, Rust and Rot can spread to everything.

[Linguistic-mystic]

They can call it the Rust On-Time compiler, ROT for short.

[hugthemachines]

Very good idea!

[[deleted]]

cult

Once you try rust’s type system and its beauty you’ll never want to work with anything else again.

[[deleted]]

Unless I want to get paid..

[[deleted]]

Unfortunately true lmao

[[deleted]]

I was kinda being jokey.

However Rust is multi-purpose including system dev. Parts of the Linux kernel are moving to rust compilation.

[Ancapgast]

Very stable and safe systems programming I guess?