RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady is challenging other analysts — including those from Forrester — who say that Java is dying. He says that those who make this claim are talking to IT decision makers, but not to “practitioners,” a.k.a. developers. O’Grady believes that the use of Java is declining because developers have so many other tools available, but that it will never die out.
To support his point, O’Grady includes data from several sources: job trends from Indeed.com, the Tiobe Programming Community Index, Hacker News mentions, and open source mailing list mentions.
He concludes, “According to the data at our disposal, it is apparent that on a relative basis, Java has peaked. It is not as popular as it once was, and is not likely to return to its former prominence in future. It is equally clear, however, that it is still a dominant platform, and the data we have on current usage and employment indicates that this position is sustainable moving forward.”
