Is Java obsolete?

This topic seems to be nearly obligatory nowadays in Java circles. Is Java a mature language about to enter its years of slow but inexorable decline? Can it be resuscitated? Should it be? Does anybody care? :)

Clearly, future will tell and there are more experienced people out there who can better articulate their predictions. As most people in my generation I moved to Java from C++ and from the very beginning I knew how many sophisticated features were missing in Java. Back then I was still learning the ropes so it is safe to say that Java is the first major language I have seen evolving from its early years. When I started using C++ it was already king of the castle . Although reading about its history was amusing I was too young to truly appreciate the concept of language life cycle.

Harking back to Java, I am more fascinated by historicity and sociological/psychological roots of programming language preferences and fashions. There are usually a few competing schools of thoughts in most technical areas. Thus, even if I tend to align with some of them I do not believe there is the only right answer. And I hear that quite often technical prowess does not always decide the fate of a technology. The longer I live the more I tend to see heavy influence of wetware on seemingly semi-scientific matter.

I remember talking to a colleague about it a couple of years ago. Under influence of the first(?) book on Java obsolescence I told him that we were not likely to write in Java in, say, ten years. I recollected the year 2000 when I myself was surprised why anybody cared about that obscure thing called Java. I was even more stunned when MSFT embarked upon cloning Java under amusical brand. Why anybody would want anything else if they already had C++?

Fast forward 8 years and more than once I have seen blogs saying that in a few years Java will be actively used only for "low-level, system development". The notion of "low-level" has changed a tad since the time I was young :) And to my personal taste, I'd rather stay in Java than do whatever will be classified as "high-level".

Lacking a CS degree I hardly heard about functional programming or LISP in my youth. And certainly never encountered such things in my professional life. When the recent FP fad started spreading through blogoshere I was mostly taken aback because I did not make much sense to me. And I was pretty irritated with the idea of learning a new language a year. Frankly, I still do not count SQL or Ant scrips as languages (unless implying DSLs) and I do not think a year of even full-time development is enough to learn a serious language (as my experience with C++ and Java tells me).

Actually what is meant by that suggestion is that there is apparently no general metamodel for features found in different languages. So there is no way to learn about a useful concept or idiom without actually spending a lot of time on learning to read languages one is unlikely to use in real life. Which sounds like wasting a lot of time to me. Actually, I prefer frameworks to languages. As an example, deep inside the Erlang runtime all those marvelous message queues and clustering features are actually implemented. I'd rather read a book on algorithms used in that implementation than learn Erlang simply to familiarize myself with those concepts. Alas, I have never seen any Erlang runtime design documentation.

I am also yet to find a paper clearly explaning how OOP and FP could be two sides of the same coin. As they intuitively seem to be (e.g. think about Erlang actors or modules as classes .. yes, strictly speaking it's far-fetched at best). Judging from the dearth of literature on FP design or UML analogs (or at least profiles) for FP people somehow manage to survive with methodologies originated in OOA&D. Which implies certain affinity.

Anyway, I am reading the first book on Scala. It's fun, it's not weird the way Erlang or LISP are, it definitely feels as Java 2.0 and it makes all kinds of Java deficiencies clearly visible. A few things look rather unnatural or necessary only for particular corner cases at first glance. But in general the language is definitely more sophisticated than Java. It also makes me believe that there is no reason to introduce major language features to Java anymore. It would feel as a different language and we would still have tons of legacy code which often does not use even generics. I did not think so even a year ago but I guess now I get what people were talking about for the last couple of years :)

There is no reason to cry about throwing closures out of Java7. Not everyone migrated even to Java6, not to mention those cursed with J2EE stuff chained to jdk1.4. It would be better to officially introduce, say, Scala as the next main JVM language and let Java peacefully lose its mind share. My guess is that we have learned enough from Java to not only wish for but also have a good idea of how a major overhaul of the JVM world should look like.