What are your opinions on the future of back-end web development? Is the Java ecosystem going to wither away as more modern and better solutions are emerging and maturing?
If so, which language/framework and/or programming paradigm do you think will become the new dominant player and how soon?
Personally I would love to see Rust becoming a new standard, it’s a pleasure to write and has a rapidly growing ecosystem, I don’t think it’s far away from overtaking Java. The biggest hurdle imo is big corporations taking a pretty big risk by choosing a relatively new language that’s harder to learn compared to what has been the standard for decades.
Playing it safe means you minimize surprises and have a very large amount of people that are already experts in the language.
Taking the risk will definitely improve a lot of things given that you find enough people that know or are willing to learn Rust, but it also means that you’re trading off Java flaws with Rust flaws. That’s the case however with every big change, and Java flaws are a good enough reason to make a big change.
fad-driven development
This is certainly a way to dismiss all other programming paradigms, I suppose. Also, having used both C# and Java, I can’t see myself writing another backend in Java again when C# is such a pleasant language to write in. Both languages have flaws of course, but I find C#'s significantly more tolerable than Java’s.
Exactly. The only reason Java is remotely tolerable today is because of influences from those ‘fad’ languages. Kotlin and Scala were also fads when they came out, they just got adopted because Java was utter shit at the time. Hell, even Java was a fad at some point in time.
The only reason Java is remotely tolerable today is because of influences from those ‘fad’ languages.
This might be your personal opinion but it is not a very informed one, or in touch with reality. Java frameworks such as Spring still dominate the backend ecosystem and some FANGs still standardize their backend development around it.
Read that again. I didn’t mention anything about ecosystem, I said Java, aka the language and JVM. You can patch it up all you want with frameworks, it is still a shit language, had an absolutely useless GC up until Java 9 (20 years into its existence). Though it has gotten slightly less shit in the last couple of years. It is informed from years of working with Java 6 onwards. The fact that I don’t agree with your opinion doesn’t make me less informed.
I think a strong argument could be made for the JVM as a whole to be honest, since it encompasses several languages. That being said, I’m not sure I’ve seen a backend written in Kotlin despite how prominent it is for app development.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a backend written in Kotlin despite how prominent it is for app development.
I worked with really Big Bank who have their whole backend written in kotlin. It was such a great thing to witness because usually financial institutions don’t give a fuck about clean code and modern programming languages.
I’ve been using ktor in a personal project and it’s been a joy; all the familiarity of Spring but with Kotlin first.
Also, I know that Amazon has started to switch some projects to Kotlin, since they’re such a large Java shop: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/adopting-kotlin-at-prime-video-for-higher-developer-satisfaction-and-less-code/
That being said, I’m not sure I’ve seen a backend written in Kotlin despite how prominent it is for app development.
That’s funny because as a backend Kotlin dev I literally haven’t seen an Android app written in Kotlin (at any of the companies I’ve worked at) but have worked since 2016 with Kotlin on the backend.
Before google announced support for Kotlin the split was massive. Most apps were backend with only a fraction Android. And Kotlin wasn’t even originally built for Android. It only happened to work and then it got popular after someone reported a bug on Android and they fixed it.
Scala got adopted? https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends/?tags=scala%2Cc%23%2Cjava their business model is killing the language
Apparently I used it at its peak. It was the go to language for big data processing at the time
This is certainly a way to dismiss all other programming paradigms, I suppose.
My comment has nothing to do with paradigms.
In fact, your strawman is proven to be false by the fact that there is no mainstream tech stack for the web which is not object oriented and provides a request pipeline that uses inversion of control for developers to pass their event handlers. They all reimplement the exact same solution and follow the exact same pattern to handle requests.
Your original comment and this one are exactly what you criticized in your first comment - opinions presented as facts. I encourage you to branch out. You might find that there are other languages and frameworks out there doing cool stuff, and IoC occuring even in the lowest level of languages.
Edit: Since you love facts so much, let’s look at some numbers. According to the Stack Overflow 2023 survey:
- JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript (which is apparently separate from JS here) all are more popular among professional developers than Java. C# and Java are toe-to-toe, with Java only 1.33% ahead (negligible at scale), while JS is more than twice as popular as both languages.
- Node.js takes the lead for web-based frameworks, with Express being the most popular listed framework that I can see. Both flavors of ASP.NET are more popular than Spring Boot among professional developers, and people have been moving towards .NET Core for years now. Flask is only 2% behind Spring Boot as well, and being a Python-based framework, does not use traditional IoC and instead follows more of a service-locator pattern, where many request-related variables are stored in what is essentially thread-local static state.
- Although meaningless on its own in my opinion, it’s still fun to point out. Java is one of the least admired mainstream languages in the survey, falling at 44.11%. It falls behind C++, C#, JS, Python, and TS. The most admired language falls back to Rust for… I forget how many years in a row, which isn’t even an object-oriented language (though borrows some concepts from them).
