4 Reasons Why Java is Still #1

The question to ask is why does Java continue to be so popular? I think there are a number of
reasons for this; let’s just highlight four:

1. Practicality
James Gosling has described Java as a “blue collar” programming language. It was designed to
allow developers to get their job done with the minimum of fuss, whilst still enabling developers
to pick up someone else’s (or even their own) code at a later date and understand what it’s
supposed to do. Sure, you can write unreadable code in Java, just as you can in any language, but
with good coding conventions it is more readable than many other languages.

2. Backwards compatibility
Sun and subsequently Oracle have made huge efforts to ensure that code written for one version
of Java will continue to run unchanged on newer versions. Although this hasn’t always been the
case (assertions in Java SE 1.4, enumerations in Java SE 5) and it has sometimes led to
implementations that could have been better without compatibility (generics) it is a very
compelling feature for developers. There’s nothing worse than taking code that works and having
to change it to make it work on a newer version of the platform. That’s just wasted time.

3. Scalability/Performance/Reliability
With over twenty years and thousands of man-years of development, Java is a rock-solid
platform that performs on a level that can match or even exceed that of native code (thanks to
some of the optimisations made by the JVM using dynamic rather than static code analysis).
When it comes to scalability, just look at some of the large enterprises using Java: Twitter (who
moved off Ruby-on-Rails to the JVM because RoR wouldn’t scale), Spotify, Facebook,
Salesforce, eBay and, of course, Oracle. Hadoop, Cassandra and Spark, the basis of most big
data projects, are either written in Java or Scala and run on the JVM. If you want scalability and
performance, Java and the JVM is an obvious choice.

4. Freshness
To me this is the big one. Looking at the TIOBE graph there is a significant upswing in Java
popularity since October 2014, which is shortly after the launch of JDK 8. JDK 8 was a big
change for developers using Java because of the introduction of Lambda expressions and the
streams API. Suddenly Java developers could do things in a more functional way without having
to learn a whole new language like Scala. These features also make it potentially much simpler
to take advantage of multi-core/multi-processor machines without having to write lots of
complex and potentially error prone multi-threaded code. With project Jigsaw scheduled for
delivery in JDK 9 we’ll see modularity make big enterprise applications much easier to build,
deploy and maintain. There are already plans for new language features, like value types, in JDK
10.
I look forward to seeing Java being awarded Programming Language of the Year in another ten
years’ time.