Isn’t Java dead ?
Welcome to Java 21, the latest LTS. It has been innovating at a pace only rivalled by languages like Typescript. But, with the advantage of over 3 decades of tooling, best practices, and documentation available.
All the Coding LLMs, and hence AI Agents and Chat tools, have enough knowledge from the open source software published by the long living foundations like Apache, IBM, Oracle, and many more.
And, we are now seeing specialized distributions now available from all major Cloud Infra providers that are optimised for their environments, and use cases. There is then the GraalVM, which aims to compile java to native code, on all platforms. There is work to bring Java to WASM too. So much to choose from.
Java was designed, from the beginning, to help reduce programmer errors by enforcing structure. And the design patterns, and best practices evolved to take advantage of it. Checked Exceptions, Single public class in a file, package scope classes and properties, and the Single inheritance model, along with Interfaces gave a lot of protection. Java also is one of the languages that supports Functional, and Object Oriented styles of Programming. And it is adding new capabilities from other languages and tools very quickly.
Java tooling has had time to mature. Eclipse, IntelliJ Idea, and VSCode Java extensions are all very usable, even today. Some more than others, but you get the point.
