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Businesses Programming

Java and JavaScript Remain the Top Enterprise Developer Languages For the Cloud, Survey Finds (zdnet.com) 101

Programmers may love hot newer languages like Kotlin and Rust, but according to a Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) recent survey of global enterprise developers and IT decision makers, Java and Javascript are the top enterprise languages. ZDNet: That said, the CFF also found [PDF] that, "More and more, businesses are employing a polyglot and a multi-platform strategy to meet their exact needs." The CFF discovered 77 percent of enterprises are using or evaluating Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS); 72 percent are using or considering containers; and 46 percent are using or thinking about serverless computing. Simultaneously, more than a third (39 percent) are using all three technologies together. For companies this "flexibility of cloud-native practices enables [companies to move] away from a monolithic approach and towards a world of computing that is flexible, portable and interoperable." That means, while Java and JavaScript are only growing ever more popular, the larger the company, the more languages are used. After the Java twins, C++, C#, Python, and PHP are the most popular languages.
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Java and JavaScript Remain the Top Enterprise Developer Languages For the Cloud, Survey Finds

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  • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @04:39PM (#57169984)

    I wonder how many people polled didn't know that Java and Java Script are totally different things and if that skewed the results?

  • Legacy decision (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dunkirk ( 238653 ) * <{david} {at} {davidkrider.com}> on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @05:09PM (#57170158) Homepage

    I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia. I've used Rails as my main tool for 10-11 years, since the 2.x days. In the company I work for now, the one app I had written has been mothballed, and I was told I could no longer use it.* My choices were either .NET or Java, and that's simply because we had been an "IBM/Oracle shop" for 25 years, until we became a "Microsoft shop" since transitioning to O365. Because what I'm integrating with is all Java, I chose Java, but these days, to even try to compete against modern stacks, that implies Spring, and either Angular or React.

    My theory is that old, manufacturing-based companies are just locked into a mindset of "this is what we do," and that comes from an answer from 20-30 years ago. They don't care to optimize for IT tools, because it's not their expertise, and they're throwing money down the drain because the C-levels just play the game of hiring consultants to implement whatever Microsoft pays to put in the trade magazines. So we get H1-B's with, and outsource for, that skillset. And then the consulting industry educates and trains for this skillset, and it becomes a self-perpetuating legacy situation, a little like Cobol and mainframes. We just can't get away from it, because it's too hard to switch everything to something else.

    * The person responsible for the decision told me, "You're the only person in the company who knows it." I asked, "Rails is the most productive thing I've seen in 15 years; why wouldn't we hire for that?" I didn't get a response.

    I've come to the conclusion that I hate using Java for web apps.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Come to the dark side...server-side JavaScript!

      It will make you want to drop both Java and .NET cold turkey.

      It may even make you happy you stepped away from Rails.

      And JavaScript will not die not matter how many stakes you drive through its heart.

      It has taken over the UI/UX (Angular, React).

      It's making inroads to take over all the service layers (node.js).

      It is also taking over the data layers (NoSQL, such as MongoDB and CouchDB).

      One language to rule them all, and in the dorkness bind them!

      • Blazor for .Net will make javascript obsolete and build directly into WebAssembly and eliminating hundreds of js files needed for a clean angular site for example...bye bye loading all those files or making tons of needless requests per "page load".
    • I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia.

      How about idiocracy? The same effects make PHP popular, and keeps Perl around long past its expiry date. Not to mention Visual Basic, thankfully nearly dead now, but after causing how much damage?

      • I remember back in the good old days of yore on slashdot where Perl was the coolest thing ever and would be the all new king of all languages like C++. It died out of nowhere as you would be modded -1 faster than you could say goatse 15 years ago on here if you dared say anything bad about Perl.

      • Language "expiry date" = I want to play with a new toy, I'm bored with this one.

        Company systems are not the programmer's play toys regardless of the current collective outlook. They are something to develop and keep running for years. And that means boredom.

        If a system is working, it's working. The desire to redo the damn thing in a newer language is simply wanting to play with new toys. You build it and run it until it *actually* cannot handle either volume or speed, not until a newer language co
      • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

        I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia.

        How about idiocracy? The same effects make PHP popular, and keeps Perl around long past its expiry date. Not to mention Visual Basic, thankfully nearly dead now, but after causing how much damage?

        Well, you can look at it as all those PHP, Perl, and VB projects as being potential clients for you to upgrade at some point in the future when they creak and fail or become unmaintainable for various reasons such as cost, stability issues, or merely time to get new features out to market.

        • Well, you can look at it as all those PHP, Perl, and VB projects as being potential clients for you to upgrade at some point in the future when they creak and fail or become unmaintainable for various reasons such as cost, stability issues, or merely time to get new features out to market.

          You could say the same about badly engineered bridges. How much damage will they cause in the process of falling apart?

          • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

            You could say the same about badly engineered bridges. How much damage will they cause in the process of falling apart?

            There's lots of badly engineered bridges. Fortunately for us, most are designed with factors of safety and conservative enough assumptions that make them unlikely to fail during their intended lifespans. The problem occurs when someone stretches those numbers to achieve something for aesthetics or to go slightly further than before and slashes the factor of safety to something that can be corroded away with poor maintenance.

    • There is no good use of Java for anything.

      • But nevertheless many big internet companies completely run on Java or other languages running on the Java Virtual Machine.

    • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

      I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia. I've used Rails as my main tool for 10-11 years, since the 2.x days. In the company I work for now, the one app I had written has been mothballed, and I was told I could no longer use it.* My choices were either .NET or Java, and that's simply because we had been an "IBM/Oracle shop" for 25 years, until we became a "Microsoft shop" since transitioning to O365. Because what I'm integrating with is all Java, I chose Java, but these days, to even try to compete against modern stacks, that implies Spring, and either Angular or React.

      Well, your first problem is you're running Spring and Angular/React. Both of the latter are highly volatile toys of the moment (or at least were two years ago, I know, I know, ancient in web time but my current projects were all started prior to that) and Spring is COBOL for java apps. There are 1 or 2 useful things in Spring, but you need to be careful how you use it and quarantine it in your development.

      * The person responsible for the decision told me, "You're the only person in the company who knows it." I asked, "Rails is the most productive thing I've seen in 15 years; why wouldn't we hire for that?" I didn't get a response.

      I've come to the conclusion that I hate using Java for web apps.

      You know why Rails sucks and you can't find anyone in the corporate environment to run it? You can start with performance, security and maintainability over time. Corporate environments, at least the ones I work for, run upwards of thousands of transactions a second with millions upon millions of rows of data, hence the long project timelines, you don't turn the titanic in a couple of minutes. Those kinds of project timelines also attracts the interests of coders because of the relative job security. So you get lots of people interested in Java, and very few interested in the gee-whiz Rails thrown together in a week by 1 or 2 people project. Don't get me wrong, Rails has a place in the world - primarily quick POCs for basic workflows. But anything large-scale with reasonable throughput? Not a chance, and I'd double down on that since security will be a concern in any system I work with.

  • by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @05:17PM (#57170204) Homepage

    The survey analysis seems to be written by people who don't understand programming at all. The conclusions are completely idiotic.

    First complaint: JavaScript is not a darling language everyone loves. It's the only language that runs on a web browser (*). So stop acting impressed or surprised at it's popularity! Duhhh!

    Check out some of these gems:

    But enterprise-sized companies are now using multiple languages for their projects. That's new. Historically, larger companies have practiced tighter control over production projects.

    Historically, we had the ability to use a single language. But we can't any more, because every project must be JavaScript + something + probably SQL. Yes, the "something" could be JavaScript, but that isn't usually the best choice on the server side. This isn't what we *want* it is what we are stuck with because of the browser. This conclusion would only seem meaningful if you were looking at the statistics over time, but had no idea what you were talking about.

    For students and programmers looking for a corporate job, it's clear the older languages are the way to go. The future is in the cloud, but its languages are decades old. At the same time, they'd be wise to pick up containers, cloud, and container manager

    I don't even know what this is saying. How can the future be old? Or the cloud, which is new, be using old languages? Then they confuse languages with containers. It almost looks like a Markov generator wrote this paragraph.

    the larger the company, the more languages are used.

    Wait, you mean having more projects means more languages? Well it cannot possibly mean LESS languages, so this conclusion is completely mindless!

    (*) Even if a developer codes in TypeScript, they would still answer "JavaScript" for survey purposes since it is never totally hidden.

    • is that it's a proxy measurement for Web based applications. PHBs love their Web apps.

      And the real significance of this article is that what programmers want doesn't matter. Just take the money and write the code, code monkey. And try to forget why you went into software in the first place, because none of that matters anymore.
      • And the real significance of this article is that what programmers want doesn't matter.

        Unless, of course, they are the ones shoveling money into the project. If I hire you, you do what I want and, yes, your desires don't enter into it. Software is not a friggin' "calling".

    • I only write UIs for myself and I still use JavaScript for them. I don't care about using a web browser for ease of access.
      It has become the lingua franca of UI design. UIs are so fucking messy only a messy language can deal with them.

      • I write my own GUI stuff and I use Python. I used to use Perl, which is a very, very messy language. I got fed up with that and switched.

        No regrets. A reasonably clean object-oriented language is what you want to tame the mess.

        Can't really defend the lambdas, but the rest of it... oh yeah.

        I've also done C++ with MFC, because PHBs. It's a bit of of a mess, but at least it's a fast mess.
    • For the frontend you always could use something like GWT, Vaadin, Sencha. Yes, it gets compiled to HTML + JavaScript, but you develop, debug and test all in Java.

      • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

        Just bear in mind that in this case, a developer will likely still answer "JavaScript" in a survey, since JavaScript is involved. So from a statistical standpoint it would still look like JavaScript was king. Maybe one day it will be treated more like machine code, and developers won't bother to learn it.

    • Blazor (.Net) runs .Net in any browser through WebAssembly and removes the 100s of js files needed in angular/js frameworks. Welcome to the future.
  • I am not Scottish, but if I were this would merit at least one jing. perhaps even a criven.

  • by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @11:20PM (#57171630) Journal

    The complexity of assembler with the efficiency of javascript.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The author of this article has never touched a line of code in his life.

  • As much as Rust has its fanboys, the issue remain that it doesn’t offer many benefits over C and to get any real work done you have to write bindings in C anyway. And then you’re offered to write major issues into RFC where they get endlessly debated between Poettering-style purists and practicalists.

    A language should work, not ideally but practically. If I can’t write things natively because some idealistic thread or type safety issues that don’t agree with the real world (where we

  • ... is the impotent anger of the pedantic, whiny, irrelevant failures who can't stop complaining about the fact that they learned the wrong set of tools but refuse to admit it.

  • You've probably never heard of them.

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