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.
I think that India will be a major factor and there are many Java developers. C-level guys don’t care about programming languages, they do care about cheap labor. So I don’t think that Java is going to wither away anytime soon, at least on a global scale.
This was said 20 years ago and none of it was true. Outsourcing is big but we don’t outsource our highest level jobs. The typical architect role or senior engineer roles
Unless it’s a 10-man startup, a typical company doesn’t employ exclusively architects and senior engineers.
By the way, I think it’s quite arrogant to think about this in terms of outsourcing and “we”. “We” might not outsource everything, but there’s a huge market with a lot of potential beyond borders where “we” are located. That’s why I explicitly said:
That is a bit dismissive of Java developers around the world. There are several of us still left and we are in key positions of power.