NFJS London – Java is Dead; Long live the JVM

“It’s time to deprecate Java as a language.” Venkat Subramaniam during the NFJS, London panel discussion

For a Java conference, the focus of a lot of the London NFJS was beyond Java: not Java hating, but a feeling that Java has had its innings and it’s time to move on. And a lot of the moving on was to Groovy.

I hadn’t previously paid much attention to Groovy. After all, I have Ruby. Now there are many reasons to sit up and take notice:

• The Java to Groovy migration path is miniscule. Swap javac for the latest version of groovyc and you can mix in Groovy with your Java classes: groovy can call Java; java can call Groovy. It all compiles down to bytecode so the JVM doesn’t care.
• Major support for Groovy in IntelliJ 7.
• It’s got pretty much all the items on my “what I would like Java to have had” shopping list including
  • closures
  • dynamic arrays
  • language support for Maps (Hashes)
  • metaprogramming and open classes (recent addition)
  • operator overloading

Groovy did not hog the “moving on from Java” vibe, though. JRuby got a look-in and Neil Ford gave a keynote on “Polyglot programming”. Neil expounded on an idea that seems to be coming back into fashion: the Unix idea of using the right “sharp tool” for the job applied to programming languages.

Sunday, September 16, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments