I’m Consistent, is that Boring?

William Grosso @ December 26, 2008

I’m spending most of today preparing for my upcoming Java SIG talk (Jan 6, Cubberley Community Center in Mountain View). The abstract for the talk is:

The rise of next-generation languages that run on top of the JVM is probably the most interesting thing to happen in the Java universe since the combination of the Spring framework and the EJB 2 specification signalled the complete implosion of the Enterprise Sofware Stack

In this talk, I’ll cover, in sequence:

• A brief overview of the state of the art of web application development
• A brief overview of Groovy, one of the most interesting of the next-gen languages available on the JVM.
• A brief overview of Grails, the best web-application framework currently available (where “best” is, of course, highly idiosyncratic)
• The source code to an actual working web application written in Groovy/Grails.

But, in reality, the talk will mostly be about next gen JVM-based languages and programmer productivity.

The thing that impresses me the most, as I think through the argument, is how consistent I’ve been for the past 6 years.

In 2003, I gave a colloquium talk at CSU Sonoma on why Java is much better than most people gave (or give) it credit for. I was completely right, and the arguments I gave there still mostly hold water. Which means that, for the coming few years, I think Java is still going to be the dominant programming language.

In 2004, speaking at No Fluff Just Stuff (and clarifying afterwards), I made the following four claims:

1. The rate of programming language change and adoption in the mainstream is going to continue to slow down¹.
2. The style of apps we build will more or less be the same.
3. I think that “web-architectures” (fat server, thin client, markup delivered to interpretation engine) are good enough for >95% of our apps.
4. Server-side container architectures are slimming down and becoming less overwhelming. But client-side containers (and that’s really what a web-browser is) are going to take off.

Of course, the world is changing now. The current downturn², the general maturation of everything, and the rising of what I, with only mild levels of sarcasm, will call “LISP-like language features” means that it might be time for a sea-change.

I’ll know what I think when I finish the slides for my January talk.

1. And if you think that’s not true, you need to check out the “long term trends” in the Tiobe Index↩
2. Read: engineers with spare time↩

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