Why are you not using [the language of the year] instead of Java?
Over the years, I get asked frequently: "Why are you not using [the language of the year] instead of Java?" At my very first serverside project, I had to justify myself for using Java instead of Perl. In the early Java years, I got frequent questions about whether we should switch to Python, later Jython.
I collected the languages for the question Why are you not using (...) instead of Java?
in chronological order:
- Perl (~1994)
- python (~1995)
- jython (~1997)
- Groovy (~2004)
- Scala (~2004+)
- Ruby on Rails / jRuby (~2006)
- CoffeeScript (~2010)
- Ceylon (~2011)
- Clojure (~2012)
- Dart (~2013)
- TypeScript (~2014+)
- Kotlin (2017+)
Because of the high project workload, I never managed to learn anything else than Java and JavaScript. Therefore we never had to migrate to anything else. However, if I had to pick one language from the list above, I guess Python would be the most useful one to know.
I'm already curious about the next programming language of the year 2021+.
Maybe it is going to be the compact and expressive COW-language (2006 blog post)?
