I want no monuments

Today I’ve had the pleasure to read InfoQ^[0] and its comments about Ola Bini’s^[1] opinion about the coming or not of a Next Big Language.

I share Ola’s opinion: no big language for your future, forget it.

Newer apps will be built with a mix of different languages, because each tool is born to solve one or few problems, and usually they are very good at it. Increasing software complexity will lead to a finer grained choice about which language best fits the problem to solve.

Question is: how do these languages communicate? Ola thinks they are all going to live on top of a JVM. That’s probably what will happen. Because that will make things easier.

That leads to the next question: will Java die? No. If we are going to stay in the JVM (and there is already evidence of it: JRuby, Groovy, Scala, Jython…) then we will gently move to these new worlds while keeping on using, developing, improving and investing on our solid code base.

I think no one can really predict the death of a language. We could only throw thoughts about what could change.

Language interoperability and polyglot programming could be good guesses.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 1:27 am and is filed under Software Development, Knowledge, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.