Oracle is
Dylan Hardison, a software developer for a small firm in Tampa, Florida, says his employer, once a Perl-oriented shop that also did a large amount of Java development, is now “…seeing a lot more C# work than Java work.”
[login]He and his coworkers have also noticed an uptick in client demand for C# — and also the Novell-sponsored open source C# clone Mono, which Hardison says is now “…widely used; on the Wii for instance.”
Chris Nandor, one of the programmers behind the code that runs geek discussion Web site Slashdot.org, sees Java as easy to replace if Oracle saddles it with high fees or onerous licensing terms. He sees Java being dumped in favor of “C++, C#, ObjC, Python or Ruby, depending on the context.”
Hardison says a number of his employer’s customers are starting to want their Web applications written in .NET, too, including many whose previous iterations were coded in Java.
Oracle isn’t the only reason to leave Java behind
A Tampa-area developer we can’t quote by name without risking his job says, “Java won’t die; it will limp along. But Java has hit the complexity wall.”
He believes that even without Oracle’s efforts to muddy Java’s future, it is on its way out because “humans now consider Java too complex to learn in its entirety. We have moved onto the next evolution, with other, simpler, more flexible languages that layer on top of it. Case in point: JRuby.
Our anonymous source says, in general, that Oracle is “destroying Java and Sun to make a quick buck. They are ostracizing themselves in the Open Source community by doing so,” and, “as enterprises move into the cloud, Oracle and their solutions will lose favor to simplified home-brew agile tdd/bdd developed codebases.”
