David Herron's Blog

Re: Stop the Insanity

A few weeks ago Phil Toland wrote Stop the Insanity about the "rise" in popularity of languages other than Java. (but it didn't pop up in my feed reader until today) Last year it seemed you couldn't turn around without reading another blog entry saying Ruby was going to kill Java, etc. Now the named languages are Haskell or Erlang, but the story is the same. I think the rise of JRuby demonstrates something, however.

'Java' isn't just a language.. it's an architecture that includes a virtual machine, a cross-platform application package format (.jar, etc), zillions of available libraries, a cross-platform GUI toolkit, oh and a language.

Since the architecture allows for executing on the JVM any language which can be expressed in Java bytecodes, this makes for huge flexibility. If you don't like the Java language you can choose among the other languages, and still use all the other features the environment offers.

For example I've recently been playing with Groovy. I wanted to be exposed to closures and dynamic languages and there are many things about Groovy to like. One of the coolest things about it is since it compiles to Java classes, it easily can incorporate any Java library. So I've been having great fun using the Rome library in Groovy to play with blog and podcast aggregation. Groovy makes it simple, especially due to the hugely simplified syntax for expressing an HTML document, while Rome does all the heavy lifting of making RSS and Atom simple.

If Groovy weren't running on the JVM then I'd have to spend a lot more time reimplementing Rome-like functionality in Groovy.

Comments

• IMHO Scala is a hot candidate to take a big part of the language pie away from Java, since

  it is equal in performance
  code can be written in a Java-like style (OO)
  code can be written in a Haskell-like style (fun)
  one can use existing Java libraries - like with JRuby, Groovy, ..

  
  But I agree, the platform is the ring to unite them all. :-)

  Posted by: zero on September 26, 2007 at 12:17 AM

• People have been saying that "Java is dead" since before Java was released to the public.
  Over the last few years that's changed slightly, instead of claims that "Java is dead" by people trying to get other people to move away from Java it's now at least in part claims that "Java will be dead unless it becomes XXX", fully in the know that Sun will fall head over heels trying to comply and incorporate the most hyped "features" from XXX into the language. So in that regard Java is indeed dying, it's loosing its identity and becoming ever more a massive ugly blob of language features taken left and right in order to apease those who would see the language disappear in favour of something else.
  

  Posted by: jwenting on September 26, 2007 at 06:46 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.