5 reasons why Java is gonna make a comeback

And I am not talking about the new concise main-function.

Java has been a very popular language for a long time now. In recent years however, it started to trend downward in terms of popularity (According to the PYPL index). More modern languages like Typescript, Rust and Go have been gaining a lot of ground compared to older languages like Java. Yet, there are many reasons why I believe Java will remain relevant and might even rise back to fame as the most popular programming language

Photo by Fahmi Fakhrudin on Unsplash

Still a popular language

Java is the second-most taught programming language in many top U.S. computer science departments.

That means that there is still a steady supply of new Java developers entering the market. Lots of new ideas and software might come from these developers meaning there won’t be a shortage of Java applications to further develop or debug.

Slow and steady wins the race

Java is slowly but steadily improving and becoming more like modern languages. This shift in the language often goes unnoticed because many companies adapt newer Java versions rather slowly.

As you can see almost about 46% of companies are still relying on a Java version that has been released for almost a decade (March 2014). Even though Java 8 already brought lots of improvements through the introduction of the Streams API and Functional Interfaces. That also leads directly into…

Java is a lot different from the olden days

The introduction of Functional Interface fundamentally changed how Java code can be written. Especially since the functional programming paradigm has been getting some traction recently (as stated in many articles on for example LinkedIn, Github or here on Medium). Java for quite some time has slowly adopted more ways apart from the super strict OOP way it used to be bound to. In my opinion, a mixture of OOP and functional programming is probably the best way to write scalable enterprise applications.

And yes, even the dreaded main method that used to require a whole class definition can now be written as:

void main() {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}

Java has one of the biggest ecosystems

Java has some of the biggest name in tech behind it. Oracle, IBM, Google and many more actively developing the language, tooling, frameworks etc, means that Java is here to stay. I think this fact becomes more and more interesting as we see the Rust Foundation’s controversy playing out right now. Community forks of Rust such as CrabLang for example raise the question if Rust itself could be overtaken by another project some day.

The Apache Foundation provided its fair share in enriching Java’s ecosystem with many frameworks and applications written Java. Many of which are highly popular and thus have been field testet by many programmers and users.

Are monoliths coming back?

Recently there have been many critiques of modern Software Architectures and deployment methods such as Serverless Computing and Microservice Architectures. An article from Prime Video very recently highlighted, that in their particular use case, it was beneficial to move back to a more “modulithic” architecture. In contrast to a language like Go, which excels in developtment of cloud and microservice applications, Java in my opinion is best used in classic monolithic server applications.

Conclusion

To sum it up, I don’t think there are some groundbreaking changes to Java, that are gonna make it by far the best programming language out there, but it seems that lots of trends are going in Java’s favor.