Thursday, November 18, 2004

Java on the slide?

I came across this a few years ago and it's interesting to monitor periodically. I see that Java has taken over an 8% dive recently and is now overtaken by C. Assuming their measurement metrics are right, then if you check out the graph there's been a downward trend for Java since 2001. I don't think this is surprising or necessarily the deathknell for the language. There was a lot of hype for Java 4+ years back and that will have encouraged people to try it when it simply isn't suitable for all use cases. Now I suspect it's just starting to find its right level.

I love Java and have used it since it was calledOak: my first program in it was a game where you could shoot off bits of Duke in a fairly gorey manner. However, my favourite programming language still has to be C++.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You should play around with Java 1.5 a bit. It's almost worth considering it to be a new language. I must admit that I went through C++ withdrawal in late 90s, but this latest release has finally made me think there's no reason to go back. Now that we officially have the concurrency primitives we need, it's high time we also got an ACE port...

Greg Pavlik

Mark Little said...

Hi Greg. Yes, I played with 1.5 and it is good, but I miss delete, reference parameters, operator overloading and multiple inheritence.

Mark.

Anonymous said...

I was quite excited by java 1.5 when it came out and thought it would make a significant impact on the way we develop java programs.

In order to evaluate it I took my 3rd-year project (a java program) and rewrote as much of it as possible using java 1.5 features, with an aim to getting the line count down as much as possible.

My eventual conclusion was that the most popularly touted features were a convenience but did not alter the way that I could solve a program significantly. In many cases, there were character savings (e.g. no need to explicitly cast due to foreach) but not line savings. In at least one case, the new approach couldn't be used to do an inflexibility.

I'd still love to see some examples of where java 1.5 really comes into its own, but for the time being I am sceptical.

--
Jon

Anonymous said...

Jon, I'd have to say compiler checked meta data annotations represent a paradigm shift, though I suspect their enablement will be for the most part of interest to infrastructure providers.

Mark, hmmmm. Maybe multiple inheritance. You can keep the rest ;-)