Java's never going to be on the bleeding-edge of trendiness (thank goodness). But there have been fewer JVM-targeting alternative languages over the past decade, because Java itself started leaning in a functional direction. It became "good enough" to negate the purpose for most of them.
At any rate, counting compile targets for hobbyist toy languages is barely one step beyond measuring GitHub stars.
> I do not know what will be the most dominant language + bytecode in 25 years
In 25 years, I'll be long gone and you can have it. By then, the industry will be pushing to automate most programming jobs out of existence altogether, and you can be the old guard arguing against that.
What about Clojure?
I 100% agree with you on Java. Some of these people who compare Java to Cobol have no idea. It’s hard for anyone to predict the future in tech but at this point Java is so widely used in the enterprise that it’s foolhardy to think that Java will disappear anytime soon.
To the credit of the Java community they keep the language relevant and refreshed.
I agree it’s always about 1-2 years behind other languages in terms of features but most enterprises don’t give a damn. Most enterprises just want to get work done. They don’t care about functional or OO.
In the last 3 years I have seen maybe 40% of developers use the latest features from java 8.
So while java might be slow to catch up that’s what it’s customers want.
Spring and Vert.x and similar Java frameworks will always keep Java relevant that it will be hard to ignore
Isn't that PART of the Java to Cobol comparison? Someone making that comparison wouldn't be saying that Java will disappear anytime soon.
The windows server running java is an area I am not sure and not much encountered. But windows and Microsoft languages are the only competitor here.
LLVM only emerged as a major target in the "last 10 years", so there's that.
And JVM already had so many major languages it didn't really have much space for others (Scala, Clojure, Groovy, and so on, including fully working clones of Ruby and Python).
Still, 4 major new languages: Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Kotlin -- all in the TIOBE top 50, from a single platform (which wasn't designed to be a language neutral target in the first place, it just happened because of it being too successful), plus the number one TIOBE index spot (Java), sounds like enough.
mentioning javascript or webassembly is also a bit strange and would seem to demonstrate some kind of misunderstanding.
LLVM has replaced JVM as a programming language target bytecode in the last 10 years (except Kotlin no new JVM language). JVM has lost web to JS 20-15 years ago, and Webassembly is now taking shape as proper web bytecode.
I do not know what will be the most dominant language + bytecode in 25 years, but I would bet $10000 that it isn't Java and JVM.