Successor to Java?

[George W. Cherry]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?
Prentice-Hall published four of my books which
featured languages (now defunct) which I loved
and embraced--Pascal and Ada. While three
of those books sold very well in the early '80's,
they are now out of print and recently the MIT
engineering library "warehoused" two of them,
because they had not been checked out for a
decade.

I'm writing a new book, currently using Java.

http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

By the time I finish it (2009?), will Java be an
anachronism like Pascal and Ada?

George

 

[William Brogden]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?
Prentice-Hall published four of my books which
featured languages (now defunct) which I loved
and embraced--Pascal and Ada. While three
of those books sold very well in the early '80's,
they are now out of print and recently the MIT
engineering library "warehoused" two of them,
because they had not been checked out for a
decade.

I'm writing a new book, currently using Java.

http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

By the time I finish it (2009?), will Java be an
anachronism like Pascal and Ada?

George

Given the volume of existing Java code at work in
the world, it is more likely to become a living
fossil like COBOL. No longer cool, but essential to
many enterprises.

 

[Daniel Bonniot]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?

One interesting point about Java is that it brought features from the world of
academic research into mainstream. Initially that was mainly garbage
collection, and now with Java 5 genericity. Of course this process is very
slow (something like 8 years between the first proposals for genericity in
Java and their introduction in the language). One also needs to take into
account that mainstream languages tend to be built incrementally from the
previous champion (C++ after C, Java after C++). Given these two factors,
Pizza (http://pizzacompiler.sourceforge.net/) or Nice (http://nice.sf.net)
might give you an idea what the next Java could look like.

The advent of common runtime (the JRE and the CLR) is favorable to
collaboration between different languages, so it well be that no single
language will become dominant, but the market will be more evenly divided
between several interoperable languages with different strengthes and target
audiences (static or dynamic typing, different paradigms, ...).

Daniel

 

[George W. Cherry]

Given the volume of existing Java code at work in
the world, it is more likely to become a living
fossil like COBOL. No longer cool, but essential to
many enterprises.

Okay, I'll rephrase my question.
What's the COOL successor to Java?
Anyone have a candidate?
Perhaps it's the Tiger release.
I dig cool.

George

 

[Alan Meyer]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?
Prentice-Hall published four of my books which
featured languages (now defunct) which I loved
and embraced--Pascal and Ada. While three
of those books sold very well in the early '80's,
they are now out of print and recently the MIT
engineering library "warehoused" two of them,
because they had not been checked out for a
decade.

I'm writing a new book, currently using Java.

http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

By the time I finish it (2009?), will Java be an
anachronism like Pascal and Ada?

George

It is sad but true that many programmers wanting a book
on algorithms or programming concepts will insist on
only buying one with examples in the language they are using.
As an author, you are therefore at risk no matter what
language you choose.

I imagine that Java is as good a choice as anything else.
It is available on many platforms, and fits the model
that Microsoft likes to call "managed code", i.e., code
that takes memory management and security out of the
hands of the programmer and puts it into the underlying
virtual machine - protecting the system from some of
the most deadly kinds of bugs. Over the long run, I think
languages of that type will supplant languages like C++
for applications programming - though not for systems
programming or programming of high volume utilities,
editors, web browsers, and the like.

Java is also a very clear and readable language, more
so perhaps than Perl or C++. And it's free, so any
student can get a copy. It should be a good choice
for teaching.

I've been very impressed with Python as a clear and
readable language with good object oriented features.
It's also free. I presume it's not yet as popular as Java
and don't know if it ever will be. There are some things
about Java I like better than Python (much more compile
time checking) and some things I like better about
Python (more flexible exception processing, more
flexible character encoding, better access to the
environment.)

Java has a much bigger API library. Python's is
smaller, but with certain heavily used elements like
lists and "dictionaries" more tightly integrated and
easier to use.

Alan

 

[Alex Kizub]

I finish it (2009?)
You are kidding! You are writing the book about Java for 5 years!
It will be definitely Java but not such book.
Already published books become obsolete immediatelly.
And you have plan for 5 years...
Save yor time, write about trees which you can save.

Alex Kizub.
Sorry, nothing personal. It's all about Java which grows too fast!

 

[Will Hartung]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?
Prentice-Hall published four of my books which
featured languages (now defunct) which I loved
and embraced--Pascal and Ada. While three
of those books sold very well in the early '80's,
they are now out of print and recently the MIT
engineering library "warehoused" two of them,
because they had not been checked out for a
decade.

I'm writing a new book, currently using Java.

http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

By the time I finish it (2009?), will Java be an
anachronism like Pascal and Ada?

Nope, and here's why.

Pascal had designed in limitations that really made it difficult to do Real
Work(tm), so you had several dialects but no real workable standard for the
language. It was basically usurped by C in the 80's, which rode the wave of
several consistent implementations on PCs as well as being the backbone of
the expanding workstation market (ala Unix).

Ada, while a fine language, never had deep penetration. Notably because of
its complexity, which made porting it to the newer, smaller hardware,
difficult.

Neither of these languages developed the core base and vendor support that
really propels languages in the market place. Pascal peaked twice, first
when it broke through with Turbo Pascal, and then later with Delphi. Ada
never peaked at all save maybe in the Defense industry because of the DoD
mandates.

Java, on the other hand, is now an extremely popular language, which enjoys
several implementations across most every platform available, an ENORMOUS
amount of available source code, and a wide array of practitioners ranging
from the embedded cell phone market up to modern monster mainframes and
clusters.

The biggest problem you may encounter would be having to bring your source
code up to date to the then current version of the JVM. Unless some of the
whatever new features they add are extremely compelling to your work, you
need not ensure that it leverages every latest bell or whistle. Just ensure
that your code actually compiles and runs on a recent JDK for the time.

Java 5 (1.5) is just around the corner, but I can assure you that once it
gets finally released, in 2005, it can easily be a year before, for example,
the major app server vendors even validate their servers to run on the new
release. So, by 2009, we should be well into Java 6.

If you write against Java 5, and then make a quick run through to ensure
that everything is ok for Java 6, I think you'll be fine.

Java isn't going anywhere. It is simply getting more pervasive, faster, and
more accepted. It still has the wind behind it and I can't see anything
taking its dominant place in 5 years.

Regards,

Will Hartung
([email protected])

 

[Gordon Beaton]

Java 5 (1.5) is just around the corner, but I can assure you that
once it gets finally released, in 2005, it can easily be a year
before, for example, the major app server vendors even validate
their servers to run on the new release. So, by 2009, we should be
well into Java 6.

Java Five?

Although Sun seems to have renamed j2se 1.5 to j2se 5.0 (when did that
happen?), it's still called Java 2...

From http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp:

"Download Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 RC"

/gordon

 

[Tor Iver Wilhelmsen]

Okay, I'll rephrase my question.
What's the COOL successor to Java?

COOL was the codename Microsoft used for C#.



But the question is better suited for clj.advocacy.

 

[Tor Iver Wilhelmsen]

Although Sun seems to have renamed j2se 1.5 to j2se 5.0 (when did that
happen?)

When C#'s next version was called C# 2.0. You cannot have Java 1.5 and
C# 2.0, it will sound like Java is less than C#.

 

[Yakov]

I'm writing a new book, currently using Java.

http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

By the time I finish it (2009?), will Java be an
anachronism like Pascal and Ada?

George

Based on my experience, unless it's a language tutorial, Java books
become obsolete within 2 years or so. People are still purchasing my
Java tutorial that was published 2 years ago, but this may not be the
case with other version specific books. People are buying books on
Unix that were published 20 years ago, but as opposed to Unix, Java
open source technologies and J2EE are living creatures and they keep
changing really fast.

If you need five years to write a Java book, most likely you're still
learning the language yourself. Unless you're extremely talented
writer, this project does not have legs...

Good luck anyway

Yakov
http://www.sys-con.com/author/?id=2514

 

[Daniel Bonniot]

You are kidding! You are writing the book about Java for 5 years!
It will be definitely Java but not such book.
Already published books become obsolete immediatelly.
And you have plan for 5 years...

Yes, that's a long timeframe. But note that this is not a book _about_ Java,
it's a book about "Situation-Driven Modeling" _using_ Java as the language for
its examples. So how much Java evolves in the mean time does not matter much.

Daniel

The Nice programming language: http://nice.sf.net

 

[Jesper Nordenberg]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?

I don't see any successor to Java right now. The Java language is
pretty good (with Java 5), the platform implementations (JVM's) are
the best available for any VM language, the available class libraries
are of very high quality and the developer tools are the best
available. As long as Java keeps developing it could remain the most
popular developer platform.

C# is an alternative to Java for developers who don't mind being in
the control of Microsoft. It's not a successor to Java, more like a
clone.

With Java 5 I think some big issues are fixed in the Java language,
like covariant return types, generics and enums. Sure, there are
better, cleaner languages available, but Java is good enough to stick
around until some new revolutionary programming paradigm is invented
(I don't see aspect oriented programming as anything revolutionary).
Maybe the biggest drawback is the lack of access control. The public,
private etc. access control system is too limited. There should be
something similar to C++'s 'friend'.

/Jesper Nordenberg

 

[George W. Cherry]

Is the successor to Java on anyone's horizon?
Prentice-Hall published four of my books which
featured languages (now defunct) which I loved
and embraced--Pascal and Ada. While three
of those books sold very well in the early '80's,
they are now out of print and recently the MIT
engineering library "warehoused" two of them,
because they had not been checked out for a
decade.

I'm writing a new book, currently using Java.

http://sdm.book.home.comcast.net

By the time I finish it (2009?), will Java be an
anachronism like Pascal and Ada?

Thanks for all the responses which I've read,
appreciated, and sometimes read twice.

Incidentally, the book project is not ABOUT
Java--it's about Situation-Driven Modeling
in Software Engineering (as one responder
pointed out).

BTW, Java is firmly ensconced at MIT. I just did
a search for "Java" in MIT's OCW* initiative,
and I got 382 page hits. While a few of these
hits may be about coffee or the Indonesian
Island, most of them are about the program-
ming language Java. (Certainly "Java Junkies"
in a Sloan School marketing course is about
coffee.)

But C# has had some adoptions also. Here's
a description from a "Foundations of Soft-
ware Engineering" course:

Foundations of Software Engineering"Course Description:

This is a foundation subject in modern software development techniques for
engineering and information technology. The design and development of
component-based software (using C# and .NET) is covered; data structures and
algorithms for modeling, analysis, and visualization; basic problem-solving
techniques; web services; and the management and maintenance of software.
Includes a treatment of topics such as sorting and searching algorithms; and
numerical simulation techniques. Foundation for in-depth exploration of
image processing, computational geometry, finite element methods, network
methods and e-business applications. This course is a core requirement for
the Information Technology M. Eng. program.



*OCW (Open Course Ware) is a free and open
educational resource for faculty, students, and self-
learners around the world.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm