Is Java the new Cobol?
InfoWorld has written an article declaring that Java is the new Cobol, and that it’s the most underreported tech story of 2007. Here’s the article
What do you think?
Personally, most of my experience is .NET and so I agree with some of the comments in the article about .NET being certainly a language of the future and the increasingly common choice for businesses. But it seems to me that it’s a bit of a grandiose claim to make that Java is as outdated as Cobol. There’s plenty of room in the tech world for multiple major languages, and the client’s needs, rather than some trend, should determine which one is appropriate for a project. That’s why we have expertise in many different languages and projects going in a variety of technologies.
There’s plenty of room for .NET, Java, and Ruby on Rails. Can’t we all just get along? ;^)
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:50 am
I’ve been mired in both clean and ridiculously Byzantine Java code for the past few months, and I think my thoughts on the matter are expressed best by Bruce Tate in [From Ruby to Java](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_j2r “From Ruby to Java”).
To paraphrase: Java was modeled after C++, which was modeled after C, which was meant to be a System Language on which to build an operating system. That’s fine if you’re modeling the internals of a computer, but not if you’re modeling real-world things. What’s needed for that is an Application Language, and that’s Ruby.
…and Python
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
There’s never a one-size-fits-all solution. One concern that we’ve heard before is the scalability of RoR. Has anyone seen a big scale Rails deployment?
January 4th, 2008 at 12:10 am
That’s why I’ve always made it a point to diversify my tech skills. Java was eventually going to die out, and the more I’ve been working with .NET and RoR in the past year, the more I feel that Java is just so bloated (even though I had been working with Java for several years beforehand)