I just saw this book on my program manager's bookshelf:
I guess it's true. If you're a knight living in the Middle Ages, then Visual Basic would be the future. If they had known that, they would have been more motivated to die in battle.
Well, VB became VB .NET about a decade ago and from the perspective of the .NET group of languages as a whole, they have been steadily, relentlessly, mercilessly, taking market share from Java year after year and slowly driving Java into inevitable extinction.
"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." wisdom from Fight Club. The Tiobe index shows a steady long term market share deterioration for java.
1) java's "Inevitable extinction" - which I agree will happen eventually (given a long enough timeline - the Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen and if we're not yet off this rock...)
2) "they have been steadily, relentlessly, mercilessly, taking market share from Java year after year"
That may be true. But VB/VB.net ALSO have an inevitable extinction. It is possible that on this long enough timeline, they will die first, and thus not be the cause of java's death.
Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Actually, if you look at the graphs, the main trend over the last few years has been C#.NET taking market share from VB.NET.
herb slocomb
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VB .NET & C#, irrespective of some minor syntactic differences, under the hood, are the same, so I group them together under the big umbrella of ".NET" which is relentlessly eating Java alive.
herb slocomb wrote:VB .NET & C#, irrespective of some minor syntactic differences, under the hood, are the same, so I group them together under the big umbrella of ".NET" which is relentlessly eating Java alive.
Then what about Scala, Clojure, Ceylon, Kotlin, Xtend, JRuby, Jython, Erjang ...?
I wonder why the creators of the new languages are picking the JVM?
From that link, it looks like C# is increasing its popularity persistently. What is the reason behind that? Is it Microsoft's marketing of its various products that leads to more usage of C#? I have heard that C# is very similar to Java. Is it really better than Java or result of good marketing?
Saurabh Pillai wrote:From that link, it looks like C# is increasing its popularity persistently. What is the reason behind that? Is it Microsoft's marketing of its various products that leads to more usage of C#? I have heard that C# is very similar to Java. Is it really better than Java or result of good marketing?
IMHO, C# is a pretty good language. I certainly enjoyed using it -- although some of the shine may be because of Visual Studio. In many ways, you can argue that it is "better".
Of course, the big drawback is that it is Windows only. Until it is available for Linux (and/or Solaris), it will be very limited in its growth..... and IMO, Mono isn't going to work without Microsoft's official support.
I was surprised by a few things in Matthew's chart. I wouldn't have guessed that Java had such a big market share lead over C sharp. I'd always had the impression they were neck-and-neck, and the fact that I saw more demand for Java was just a San Diego thing. Guess not. Also, strange was C sharp's big rise last year. It's a fairly mature platform now, isn't it? What made it suddenly grow from 6.2% to 8.8% market share in one year? Is it the adoption of Windows 7 showing people that Windows is a viable OS again?
I was also dismayed to see the huge decline in Python and Ruby. Those are cool languages, not as mind-bending as functional languages like Scala, Clojure, Haskell, and F sharp, but offering some of the same productivity boosts. At my old job, a few of us challenged each other to solve the Project Euler problems in Python and Ruby. I think we got through 70 or so before getting busy with other things and bogging down. I still intend to get back to them some day though.
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