> Java is turning into the Cobol of our generation
Despite speed of Java evolution accelerating and Java being the best Java has ever been, I agree with this. Everything is Javascript or Python these days, Java is seen as old, boring, hard, inconvenient as you need to compile it and often it doesn't compile. Javascript/Python happily run until they don't and fail at runtime which feels like it just works (until it randomly doesn't) and you can pick up a teach yourself Javascript/Python in 24hrs style book and feel you are a competent developer very quickly.
A lot of Java positions I see now are maintenance roles, which isn't a great thing. Maintenance roles are never great, often seen as bottom tier developers. Unlike Cobol, there's likely many more people who have programmed Java than Cobol so even if Java dev becomes a niche I suspect they'll still be enough of them around that compensation is not anything significant.
Kotlin is nice, let's see where it is in ten years. Closure, Groovy, JRuby, Scala are also nice but ultimately Java won as the modern Java and all those other JVM languages that once had interest and promise are now niche or completely dead.
Despite speed of Java evolution accelerating and Java being the best Java has ever been, I agree with this. Everything is Javascript or Python these days, Java is seen as old, boring, hard, inconvenient as you need to compile it and often it doesn't compile. Javascript/Python happily run until they don't and fail at runtime which feels like it just works (until it randomly doesn't) and you can pick up a teach yourself Javascript/Python in 24hrs style book and feel you are a competent developer very quickly.
A lot of Java positions I see now are maintenance roles, which isn't a great thing. Maintenance roles are never great, often seen as bottom tier developers. Unlike Cobol, there's likely many more people who have programmed Java than Cobol so even if Java dev becomes a niche I suspect they'll still be enough of them around that compensation is not anything significant.
Kotlin is nice, let's see where it is in ten years. Closure, Groovy, JRuby, Scala are also nice but ultimately Java won as the modern Java and all those other JVM languages that once had interest and promise are now niche or completely dead.