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A Question About the Future of Java

 
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Bear Bibeault wrote:

If you want to future-proof your career, go the JavaScript route.



This is part of Bear's answer on this thread: Is Client-side Java Universal

Is the Java career track dying?

I'm new to Java and want to know if it's still a profitable avenue of study, or if I should do as he suggests here.
 
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1. Remember this is just one persons oppinion. Bear happens to be a very knowledgeable person with a huge amount of experience in this field but there's no gaurantee that in the next n years there won't be some major new technology, shift in emphasis etc that renders Javascript or any other currently popular language virtually obsolete. I certainly agree with him that applets are dead though.
2. Bear was just talking about client side Java. Java is extremely popular for server side development and is also used in stand alone applications.
 
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Fight Club wrote:On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.


This applies to programming languages as well, including Java in all its shapes and forms. If by "career" you mean 5 years out, you'll likely be fine with Java. If you mean 30 years out - be prepared for learning and adapting.
 
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You're taking Bear's comment out of context. The topic in which he said that was about client-side Java. Java has never really been very popular for client-side code (graphical user interfaces). Nowadays, the client side of web applications is being written more and more in HTML5 and JavaScript.

For server-side programming, Java is the most used programming language in the world and it will stay that way for a long time.

No, the Java career track is not dying.
 
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Douglas Knapp wrote:I'm new to Java and want to know if it's still a profitable avenue of study, or if I should do as he suggests here...


As with the others, I'd certainly say it's a profitable avenue of study; but not just monetarily.
1. Learning Java well will teach you all sorts of concepts that will serve you in many other areas: Object Orientation, loose coupling, and code re-use.
2. There are several "niche" areas, such as Android, where you can establish yourself as a valuable commodity.
3. Learning it will teach you some stuff about the JVM, which also supports several other languages.
4. Unlike many other languages/systems which claim platform-independence, Java+JVM really delivers it; so unless what you're doing is highly specialized, you really can write a Java program once and run it on virtually any major OS.

I've been in the biz for more than 35 years now and Java is my 6th major language - along with a couple of "glorious failures" that never really took off, and a few scripting languages - so don't imagine, if you're around in 10 years time, that Java will be the only language you know.

Winston
 
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If you become good at programming you should have skills that are transferable to other languages. Once you are competent in Java for example, it should not be a huge leap to learn C#, Python, or C++ for example. Obviously each language has its own idiosyncracies and may use different idioms so they will take time to master, but a good programmer will adapt.

As others have said Java is very much alive right now, just not as a Client Side technology.
 
Douglas Knapp
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Thank you, all, for your responses. I'm more at ease now with my choice of language.

Now, to whip my ADHD into line and actually learn Java.
 
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