Like many Computer Science graduates Java was the first language I’d say I really learnt. Sure I’d dabbled in C and VB but Java is where I first wrote meaningful code beyond examples from the text book. Again like many Computer Science graduates, I turned my back on Java pretty soon after that.
The need is not to get the most out of your hardware but to get the most out of your data, as quickly and continuously as possible to retain your advantage.
My experience in video game programming as well as my current day job around research computing (although not in a programming capacity) both feature squeezing every drop out of hardware which sadly leaves little space for Java. In both code written in fast low-level languages is optimised to exploit the hardware it will run on.
The ongoing data analytics and machine learning revolution, surely the most exciting area in IT at the moment, is bringing with it a data-centric approach of which we should all take note. The need is not to get the most out of your hardware but to get the most out of your data, as quickly and continuously as possible to retain your advantage.
Spark for example is written in Scala, which compiles into Java byte code to run on the Java Virtual Machine which itself finally runs on the hardware. Furthermore many Spark apps are themselves written in a different language such a R or Python which have to first interface with Spark. This is a lot of layers of abstraction each adding overheads which would be shunned by performant orientated programmers.
Yet when I look at these stacks I instead see wonderful things being done and begin to see past my preconceptions.
I’m also seeing containers grow in prominence which are a natural fit for Java development. With S2I builds (source to image) developers can seamlessly inject their code from their git repository into a Docker image and deploy that straight onto a managed system.
Whilst C++ will remain the norm for mature performant orientated applications, hypothesis testing and prototyping to yield quick results is giving an extra life to Java.
