Java has been around for 20 years or more, depending on who you ask and how you compute. Regardless of its age, Java is still number one. Its usefulness, performance, and backward compatibility all demonstrate its value.
The beginning of 2016 marks that we have gone through 20 years of Java. In fact, although Java claimed to be released publicly on May 23, 1995 (the HotJava browser did not have the same success), the first official JDK was released on January 23, 1996, so Java You could call it just turned 20. There's a lot to look back on about Java, but I think what's more interesting is why Java is still so successful after 20 years.
Accurately measuring the popularity of programming languages is difficult, but a generally accepted metric among many survey statistics is the TIOBE index. It is capable of language tracking through various search engines as well as Google Blog, Wikipedia and even YouTube. (While writing this, I learned something new, which is that TIOBE is actually an acronym for "The Importance Of Being Ernest", which is a play by Oscar Wilde, although I don't know what the program is. design language has nothing to do with it).
Looking back at the achievements of the past fifteen years, Java has always been one of the best. Java has taken the place once held by C, which was the most talked about language before Java became popular. (How quickly things can change! Back in 1986 Lisp was the second language and Ada was the third). The TIOBE index has also just declared 2015 to be the year of the Java language, which was awarded ten years ago.
As another indicator of penetration, Oracle often likes to cite the statistic that there are nine million Java developers in the world. If you want to have some fun, then check out this article which provides some details on how the number of developers reached that number. Ignoring these details, I think everyone agrees that there are literally millions of Java developers around the world.
So why does Java continue to gain popularity? I think there are still some reasons, here we list four:
1. Practicality
James Gosling described Java as a "blue-collar" programming language. It allows developers to complete work with minimal effort, while allowing developers to continue to work on other people's (or even their own) code and understand what it means after a period of time. Of course, you can also write poorly readable code, as you can in other languages, but using good coding style can make it more readable than many other languages.
2. Backward compatibility
Sun and later Oracle (Oracle) have made a lot of efforts to ensure that one version of Java code can run normally in the new version. While this is not always the case (like assertions in Java SE 1.4 and enums in Java SE 5) and sometimes incompatible practices lead to better implementations (like: Generics), backward compatibility is not a problem for developers It's still a compelling feature. There is nothing worse than modifying normal code in an old version to run it on a new version of the platform. It's just a waste of time.
3. Scalability/Performance/Reliability
Driven and developed over more than 20 years and by thousands of developers every year, Java has become a solid platform that can match or even surpass native code (thanks to some of the JVM's use of dynamic rather than static code parsing optimization). When it comes to scalability, look at some of the big companies using the Java language: Twitter (abandoning the JVM's Ruby-on-Rails because it can no longer scale), Spotify, Facebook, Scalesforce, eBay, and of course Oracle. Hadoop, Cassandra and Spark, the basic frameworks of big data engineering, all use Java or Scala and run on the JVM virtual machine. If you want good scalability and performance, Java and JVM are the best choices.
4. Freshness
For me this is the most important one. Looking at the TIOBE statistics, we can see that Java's popularity has increased significantly since October 2014, just after the release of JDK8. JDK8 has brought significant changes for Java developers with the introduction of Lambda expressions and the Stream API. Suddenly Java developers can develop in a much more efficient way without having to learn a whole new set of languages like Scala. These features also make it possible to more easily take advantage of multi-core/multi-processor machines without having to write a lot of complex and potentially error-prone multi-threaded code. As the Jigsaw project kicks off for the release of JDK 9, we'll see modularity making it easier to build, deploy, and maintain large enterprise applications. At the same time in JDK10, plans for the development of new language features are already underway, such as value types and so on.
I'm very much looking forward to Java being the programming language of the year for another decade.
Translation link: http://www.codeceo.com/article/4-reason-java-no1.html
English original: 4 Reasons Why Java is Still #1
Translation author: Code Farm Network – Shan Jie
