Java Magazine, Jan/Feb 2016

ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JANUARY FEBRUARY 2016 04 from the editor among younger programmers Here too Java is hot It currently sits behind only JavaScript in popularity This represents a remarkable ascent GitHub initially rose to popularity in the Ruby community In 2008 Java was the seventh most popular language on GitHub Ruby was first Javas ascent of five positions in the intervening years is unmatched During the same period no programming language has managed to rise more than two slots I expect its popularity to continue due to Javas ubiquity on the cloud every major cloud provider supports it and its central role in the Internet of Things Among third party JVM languages the only two entrants to make it into the TIOBE top 50 or to be ranked by Open Hub are Groovy 17 and Scala 30 On TIOBE Groovy had a banner year Its hard to know the cause of this although progress in the chief complaint against it performance has surely helped In open source projects Scala has the upper hand in popularity This suggests that Groovy is more popular in business contexts which is a transition that Scala must make in the next few years in order to move out of the margins Im curious to see if it will cross this chasm Several years ago the biggest complaints about Scala were the binary incompatibility of new releases slow compile times and language complexity Today the last two concerns remain important obstacles Meanwhile languages such as Kotlin which is viewed by many as a direct competitor are putting pressure on Scala So is Java indirectly Scalas claim to fame is that it enables developers to mix object oriented OO and functional paradigms But Java 8 introduced functional programming elements which while far more modest than Scalas might induce businesses thinking of looking to Scala for its functional OO hybrid qualities to stay put Developers who prefer the functional paradigm will be pleased to know that TIOBE expects that Clojure with its Lisp like syntax and currently sitting in third place among JVM languages will soon advance to the honor roll of top 50 languages Meanwhile other functional languages such as Haskell and Erlang both broke into the top 40 spots In non JVM languages perhaps the most interesting trend which appears in multiple indexes is that JavaScripts popularity appears to have peaked A few years ago its ubiquity on front ends both web and mobile and the advent of Node js suggested that it might become the new universal programming language see Atwoods Law But limitations of the language make it dificult to use on large scale projects The result has been the growth of JavaScript transpiling alternatives such as Dart CofeeScript and TypeScript Of these I personally most admire TypeScript which also appears to be gaining the most traction among developers Ill be curious to see whether the approval of the ECMAScript 6 standard also known as ECMAScript 2015 in June of last year will improve JavaScripts popularity Well check in next year Language features and projections of future language adoption are among the most enjoyable discussions in programming Let me know if you have diferent views from mine Andrew Binstock Editor in Chief javamag_ us@ oracle com @ platypusguy