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I may be posting a premature question, and maybe I'm just freaking out for no reason, but the way Oracle is handling Java is not very promising. I am a nerd who fell in love with Java from the first sight, and use it all the time in my personal/freelance projects but now I am thinking of a replacement.
I am fluent in C#/VB.NET too but I am looking for something more like:
Open Source
Compiled
Cross-Platform
Object Oriented
Large standard library
Extensive documentation
Web development is a major plus
I was thinking about a compromise: Python/Django for web development (or PHP), and Qt for thick client development. Anyone with better thoughts?
Not so long ago, I decided to explore away from the JVM. I set foot on python, and even though i'm nowhere near the expert/ guru level, I dont regret it. Didn't choose C# (considered it) because I consider it to be more of the same. I alredy know (and like a lot) C++, so python seemed like something new, which is what I was looking for.
It fullfils many of your requirements. Particularly, i'm decided not to learn PHP, so the web frameworks in python came in great.
Not to mention, Python has a large community (also see here), always eager to help and teach, which I consider to be very important.
Just my two cents.
Might be worth loking at the other JVM languages - Clojure and Scala are the two I personally think are most promising.
Yes you are on the JVM, but you're pretty independent from Java the langauage and don't have to use any Sun/Oracle implementations if you don't want to.
Having said that - I think that you are worrying a little too much about Java, too many players (including Oracle!) have too much invested to let it go too far off course.
Try Scala. It looks extremely elegant and promising. Being object oriented and sharing a lot with java in a very concise manner.
Everything you said points to C#, except for the Open Source point.
To fix that, there's Mono.
You could try D. My one-sentence description of why it's an awesome language is that its generic programming/compile-time introspection/template metaprogramming facilities are good enough to give you almost flexibility of a duck-typed language, while its execution speed and static type checking rival or exceed C++ and C#.
I think it meets your requirements quite well.
Open source: The frontend to the reference DMD implementation is open source (the back end isn't due to restrictions beyond the author's control). Work is underway to glue the reference frontend to open source backends such as LLVM (LDC) and GCC (GDC). In the case of D1 (the older version of the language) the LLVM port is fairly mature.
Compiled: D is meant to be compiled to native machine code, i.e. raw, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Cross-platform: The reference DMD compiler supports x86 Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. GDC and LDC will likely support a lot more CPU architectures.
Object oriented: D isn't a "pure" OO language in the Ruby sense of everything being an object, or in the Java sense of not supporting any other paradigm. It does, however, fully support Java-style OO as a subset of the language, along with procedural and functional style programming.
Large standard library: D1 has Tango, which qualifies. D2 has Phobos, which is not "large" yet by modern standards but is larger than C or C++'s standard lib. However, recently there has been a large interest in contributing and Andrei Alexandrescu (its main designer) has accepted several new contributors, including myself.
Extensive documentation: The standard library and language are reasonably well documented at the Digital Mars website. There's also Andrei Alexandrescu's book "The D Programming Language".
Web development: This is an admitted weakness. D doesn't (yet) have a good web framework, though its native unicode support and excellent generic programming support should make writing one relatively easy.
I too would like another Java-like technology to come along. Lately I've been doing Flex/Actionscript. While I really enjoy it, Actionscript technology seriously lacks the elegance that Java has. Adobe can write some good cross platform APIs, but they just don't have the head capital to build elegant languages and compilers. I've also tried Ruby, but the VM for Ruby is really bad. I've gone back to Java after my flirtation with other technologies and I think it's because the language is good enough, but the JVM is by far the best out there.
So do you want to stay with the JVM or do you really want to the leave the JVM altogether? Staying on the JVM there are lots of options: JRuby, Scala, Groovy, Javascript, Clojure are the big players. However, there are tons of great languages that can take advantage of the JVM's features.
Leaving the JVM there are still good options like python, ruby, and erlang. But you give up some of the nice features of the JVM like performance (big one), and the ability to drop down to a nice language like Java if you need speed. Those others mean using C or nothing at all.
I finally stopped worrying about Java's future. Sun did all it could to screw it up and it still turned out pretty darn good. I think Opensource has a lot more influence over Java's success than Oracle or Sun could ever have had.
I can't post comments yet, so I'm posting an answer related to the Python discussion. Though Python isn't compiled to machine code, there is a Python-to-C compiler called Cython, which can compile nearly all valid Python -- closures are finally (!) in the latest development release. It's have a big impact on some parts of the Python commmunity, e.g., I was at Euroscipy recently, and over half the talks mentioned Cython.
I personally don't like PHP, but it does meet all of your requirements. It doesn't officially support compilation but there is the Hip Hop project which compiles PHP to C code. Facebook is currently heading up this project.
That said, I highly discourage you from using it :)
C# is the only thing that will meet your needs and not feel hopelessly archaic, or frustrate with limited library. For open source/non-windows, use mono. It's a good, mature implementation of most of what's important in the CLR.
Some things (WPF, WCF, etc) are "missing" from mono, but these aren't so much part of the platform as they are windows-specific proprietary toolkits. Some of them are being implemented slowly in mono, some aren't. Coming from java you won't miss them because you're looking for a platform and good standard libraries to build upon, not a gui toolkit or whiz-bang communication framework.
As far as a platform to build stuff with that's "like" java and offers similar levels of functionality, C# + CLR is the clearest option.
Using also Cython you get the best of the two worlds , the ability to code in python , the ability to code in C and C++ and of course compile your code and the ability to use both python a c/c++ libraries out of the box. And if you dont like C++ syntax , cython syntax is python syntax and more.
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Let me first of all say that I'm NOT interested in a flame war about what is better: .NET or Java... PLEASE don't post if you want to tell me how killer .NET is or how Microsoft is the evil empire so there is no way that a developer with a soul could write .NET or whatever. We've all heard it far too much before.
What I'm interested is who out there in the industry can really accurately and fairly compare and contrast the details of the two platforms. I'm looking for the rare industry luminaries who are experts in both platforms and discuss the two in reasonable terms. The only dude I'm aware of in this realm is Ted Neward if that gives you an idea of what I'm looking for. Ultimately I'm interested in their opinion of how the two platforms influence each other and what new things happening on one side are working well (which might give me insight about how the other platform is likely to evolve).
Martin Fowler has written about both.
Ron Jeffries would be another who has written a lot about java and has more recently written a fair bit about C#
I'm no Ted Neward, but I'm reasonably experienced in both Java and C#.
Despite Microsoft's early draft of the C# spec claiming that it is a mixture of C++ and VB, clearly Java was a massive influence. Since C# 1.0, however, I would argue that C# has been the language driving innovation. (Okay, a lot of the new features have already been present in other languages, but not Java...)
A lot of the proposed features from Java 7 look very much like they've been influenced by C#, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were under consideration before C# got them (just like generics in Java were being developed for years, and in the other direction there were research projects with generics in .NET before .NET 1.0 was even released).
What does the future hold? Well, personally I'd like to see a true Java 2.0 which ditches backward compatibility in order to clean up some of the messes of the past - and largely make it like C#, but with the existing platform independence. Nothing in the language of C# is tied to Windows. From that side of things, it's a real shame that Mono hasn't gone further (or been supported by Microsoft, other than Moonlight).
I have worked with both platforms since .NET was created, mostly in dual-language projects.
Java is the "spanish" of languages (written spanish has changed little for the last few hundred years or so), C# is english (most of us are unable to read 200 year old english literature)
C# has "all the bells and whistles" added nice and clean into the language. Java is fairly primitive in comparison.
Java has a huge choice of competing libraries and different ways/styles of coding, .NET is much more "single choice"; often a good choice has been done by microsoft for you. These arguments objectively lead no-place in particular; some people may consider having a lot choice is good, others may think it is an unnecessary expense. My current java project is using NONE of the libraries I used in a similar project 5 years ago; so although the language is the same the programming environment (libraries, IDE) has improved by an astonishing amount.
So as a developer I prefer C#. Still, by choice, I work in Java right now, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - still by choice. Although java the language evolves painfully slowly, there area a lot of really interesting things going on in java. The rest of my choice is based on all the things you specifically don't want to talk about; openness, the dark side and all that.
The company I work for has about half of it's development in Java (internal apps) and half in .Net (public facing apps). What is it that you want to know? there are several people in the company I work at that can contrast and compare. I admit to not knowing Java all that well though. Are you looking for specific articles, bloggers, or books?
If you are looking for a person which has compaired both frameworks Java vs .Net, then I do not have a name, however there is one KEY phrase I would like to make you very aware of
Type erasure
Generics in Java <- its mentioned here, I came accorss this by word of a work friend. (Im not sure when there will be a fix for this)
This would mean java will always be boxing and unboxing.
with reference to krosenvold
Java has a huge choice of libraries
and different ways of coding, .NET is
much more "single choice". This is
good and bad both ways.
Im not quite sure what he means by this. If i were to second guess this, you are referencing .Net's DataTable. and how .Net (used) to be data centric not domain driven?
If so I would like to mention .Net has a movement called "Alt.Net" AKA "NHibernate Mafia" where there are a number of open source libraries to allow the .net developer to do ORM/DI/MVC/TDD etc. With many of the libraries having roots from the Java world (spring, hibernate) However this is not core to the .Net or even Java Frameworks.
I would suggest considering what you want to compare.
for instance
Frameworks (including the
community/opensource ones)
Limitations (Java is 1 language, but
works on multi OS, .Net is multi
languge, yet "offically" supports
windows platforms, using Mono)
Avaliable IDE's
Here are some links to get you started.
Comparison of the Java and .Net platforms
Comparison of Csharp and Java (look for instance, they handle Enumerations differently)
HTH
Bones
Yesterday #headius / Charles Nutter came up with a very interesting idea on twitter:
#danny_l Gafter made the same mistake; I don't mean a forked Java any more than Groovy is a fork. I want a "mostly Java" with closures.
or the reply by #danny_l / Danny Lagrouw:
#headius or could the BGGA prototype be "bolted on" any future version of Java? That might be useful
That really is what I would like to see as well. Can't we have some sort of bytecode preprocessor to make the BGGA prototype work on any modern Java version? I mean scala, Groovy and JRuby have closures and produce valid bytecode!
I would even like to help and put effort in it. Although I don't really know where to start.
(the above is an excerpt of the blogpost I wrote about this topic)
What do others think of this idea?
The word 'preprocessor' takes me back to C++ and it scares me.
There is a weird dichotomy: I celebrate the diverse garden of languages on the JVM, but I think that "Mama Bear" (aka Java) should not become fragmented like this. We need a solid foundation.
That said, I am in favour of BGGA closures. I also think a language should provide its full capabilities. If a team has people who can't handle closures (or generics, or threading (!!)), then that team should police itself through code reviews and static analysis.
Maybe one idea would be to have a compile-time switch to 'disallow' advanced features like this but even that seems a bit harsh.
I think the 'bolt-on' idea is really trying to address the fractured leadership in the Java space. That problem strikes as being more political and diplomatic than technical.
The problem with making these things a bolt on is that you create a fragmented language.
The java language is the smallest part of what makes java, java. The libraries and the culture make up the larger part. Making closures and generics a bolt on means that either they cannot be used in the core libraries or that the core libraries would require the bolt on to be present in the SDK being used. This would at best create fragmentation within the libraries (as some developers work to the core and some require the bolt-on) and at worst would mean that we will start having 'distributions' of java in the manor of java each containing a different set of jars and 'bolt-ons'.
I would say this is the start of a slippery slop I would rather stay off of.
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Why would you choose java over others? Why did you choose java to program your application?
Please include what you are using java for (desktop application/ web application/ mobile).
Excellent tooling: IDE, CI, etc.
Vast array of 3rd party libraries.
Huge amount of documentation available.
Large pool of developers available.
Platform ubiquitous.
Excellent performance.
Excellent specification.
Sturdy garbage collection.
Managed memory.
Native threads.
Choice - implemented by multiple vendors.
I have used Java to build various middle-ware products: Inventory mgmt; CMS; chemical registration; etc.
One of the nice things about Java is that everyone knows it. Of course, now that I've said that, I'll get 80 comments from people claiming to have never learned the language. Be that as it may...
Like it or not, Java is the closest thing to a lingua franca (the idiom means "common language") we have in the industry today. Just about every has either used Java at some point, or (more commonly) is actively using it now. That sort of ubiquity can be extremely attractive to some companies, particularly those reliant on consultants. If you start a project in Java, you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to find talent to maintain the code base for years down the road.
On a different tack, Java is an excellent language for developing cross-platform desktop applications...it's just that nobody knows it. Most of Java's dominance is on the server side coupled with a little bit of love from the J2ME crowd. However, if you objectively consider Swing in Java 6uN, it's hard to find a better tool for the job. Don't get me wrong, I see that it has its flaws, but many of those have been fixed in recent releases. Most of the issue now is mindshare: everybody knows that Java is slow and ugly (neither of which is strictly true anymore). The other problem is that Swing is very much a cross-platform UI toolkit. This means that it is inherently much harder to create professional UIs in Swing than in Cocoa or even WinForms.
Finally, a really great reason to pick Java (as opposed to .NET or Objective-C) is the ecosystem. Other answers have mentioned libraries, which really deserve a significant spotlight; but I'm thinking specifically of the rising language diversity. If you write an application in Java today, you can seamlessly transition to Scala at any time. You also have the option to do scripting in Groovy or JRuby, not to mention taking advantage of the powerful concurrency abstractions in Clojure. Because of its portability and high-level nature, the JVM is increasingly the preferred target for language compilers and interpreters (even more than the CLR). Java is really at the center of that nexus, not really benefiting directly from the vast cloud of languages which swarm around it, but certainly deriving value from all of the interoperability, present and future.
My reasons for prefering Java over other programming languages at this time are:
price - it's free
performance - really fast these days thanks to the HotSpot JIT compiler
effectiveness - lots of power with rigorous features like type-safe, sand-boxed, etc.
OOP capability
very good, well-thought out exception handliing; C++ exceptions are the opposite!
portability - it runs on almost everything
tool availability - awesome IDEs like Eclipse & NetBeans are free, as are web servers like Tomcat and application servers (JBoss, Glassfish, Geronimo, etc.)
flexibility - does graphics, desktop GUIs, web user interfaces - all kinds of things in all kinds of runtime environments
aptness - many enterprise apps today have to support HTML, SQL, and XML - Java has good support for all of them built in and you can get third-party libraries for free that make this even easier/better
well-supported - Sun keeps adding improvements and fixing thing going one or two versions back
forward compatibility - unlike something like VB which undergoes wrenching change in its syntax every couple versions or so, Java's syntax and semantics seem about 99.9% upward compatible from version to version
I have been writing programs in Java for over a decade and I am pretty satisfied with it. I have used other languages for almost two decades before that. So I am not biased by describing the one thing I know - it is one of many languages I know intimately.
When upgrades to the JDK/JRE come out, I look the documentation over to see what is changed. Sun is good about telling/explaining this. I have never had an extremely rough time porting from one JDK to the next.
When I have switched from one OS to another as my main OS at home or at work, it has not caused a problem for the Java applications I write - or the tools I use, generally. The one exception is Borland JBuilder, which some Borland marketing or technical genius decided to frequently stop supporting. Eclipse and Netbeans run terrifically on the Mac and probably always will. I have used Java on:
MS-Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, XP
Sun Solaris/SunOS Unix
IBM AIX
Mac OS X
Linux
Motorola cell phones (MIDP, CLDC)
Palm Pilot PDA
Java VMs (virtual machines) are everywhere! They are in:
web browsers
cell phones
PDAs
desktop computers
web servers
application servers
I have written programs on all of these. All you have to do is get an IDE with the right plugins, get the API documentation for the target environment you want, and start programming.
The GUI programs I write actually do look & work correctly on different platforms! I cannot tell you how long other vendors promised to do and how often/long they have failed. Just look around, some still exist.
Sun promised this in Java 1.0 and they sort of delivered it with AWT. However, the abstract windowing toolkit used native GUI components and the differences between these components (which followed no unifying standard at all) were too great to get same/nice look/behavior on all platforms.
Sun delivered very well upon this portable GUI promise when the Swing GUI API was delivered a decade ago, back in December 1998.
1) Very good and free documentation
2) Very good developer commercial and free tools
3) good certification and training resources
4) good runtime and free tools
5) good profiling and monitoring tools
6) very good support options from various companies
7) very good open source community with huge amount of libraries
Things not yet mentioned:
Cross-platform Desktop Application, even with sophisticated GUI
bunch of tools
static typing (see GWT)
error messages at compile time
very clear error messages
Java provides a very rich API right out of the box and hands-down produces the most portable applications since there is a Java VM for almost every platform.
BTW: I haven't used Java since I left college since I work for a Microsoft shop, but I can't think of a single thing I can do in C# that I can't do in Java, whether it be enterprise applications, web applications, or desktop applications.
Portability is the key to java. I know that a program that i am coding will run on any system, there is no need to create different releases for different OS's.
Java also offers built in security, making the coding of the safe programs easier.
Java is fast, with clean code java is benchmarking in the same range as C++.
C# is the language that gets compared to java the most often. C# isn't as portable as java, and has very few features that java doesn't. This makes java much more attractive unless the program will ONLY be run on a single OS, in that case i might code it in C++.
I switched from years of C++ to Java because I was working on higher level stuff and needed the benefits of memory management, reflection, and sandboxed execution that I get with Java.
I have tried COM in the late nineties and could not touch it.
.NET looks promising and in many ways is now much better than Java. Unfortunately, being window-centric is a complete dealbreaker for me.
Another benefit is the awesome static analysis tools available e.g. FindBugs. These perform a lot of checking on your code above and beyond those performed by the compiler, and can help identify bugs and/or code smells before testing begins.
Lots of great reasons have already been mentioned. I'd like to add the political part. I trust Suns language a lot more than Microsoft alternatives. It's not because I hate Microsoft, it's just that Sun is going a direction with Java that I really like, and Microsoft is going a direction with .net etc. that I really don't like.
This is very subjective, I know. But to me it seems like Sun really want to create a great language, and try to make money somehow. While Microsoft seems more interested in making money by vendor lock-in and systems that looks great and feels great, but may not be as good as it looks in the long run.
So the way Microsoft is handling it right now, I don't even care about how good or bad it is, technically. I don't care, I'm not going to use it.
Java has everything I want from this kind of programming language, including all the boring political stuff most people just skip. I don't know about any other current language that has all that.
The main reason I use Java for most of my desktop app projects is for cross-platform compatibility. It's quite easy to make your app run on OS X, Windows, and Linux and look native on all platforms.
I use Java for our BPM platform and used Java in the past for enterprise web apps.
It depends on what you want to do. Considering language features, libraries available and IDE experience, I personally would choose C# over Java. C# 3.0 has many useful features that Java lacks, such as LINQ, Lambda expressions, etc. Some people prefer the huge library choice that is available for Java, but I think there are just too many ways of doing things. Java IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans are getting better, but I think Visual Studio is still much easier to work with.
Of course,if you are not using Windows, you don't have much of a choice but to choose Java. Ruby and Python can be good options for things like utility apps and GUIs, including Web apps, but for enterprise apps that don't use Windows, Java is pretty much the only option.
Please don't follow blindly all java-entousiasts. Java has its own flaws. Java is great for rapid development, enterprise oriented stuff, and "high productivity" project (with the tons of projects, community,...).
And if one guy show me a benchmark highlighting how java code can be as optimal as C stuff doesn't mean the complete java solution is fast and lightweight.
Java will never find its way on some performance critical applications, like games, codecs, web browser. No major game software is developed in java, and not because the developper are not capable of writing one piece of Java code that has the same speed as C or C++, this is because the very limitations of the language involves that performance and memory consuption will never reach a good C/C++ code. Takes VisualStudio and Eclipse. Java is great for one stuff (productivity stuff, enterprise middleware), but if you want to write codecs, games, performance critical libraries, you'd better try knowing C.
But, one the other hand, you'll write the java code faster and safer, with C and C++ you're taking more risk (pointers!) and this takes usually more time.
And don't forget the joke "Write once, Debug everywhere", this is actually true. You have to deal with different JVM implementation nightmare with Java.
Other programming language have their interest, bash/python scripts for local scripts (repetitive action, fast and quick UI,...). Php or ruby for webapplication are very well deployed and documented on the web.
Using it for desktop applications.
Excellent IDEs available, wonderful API, "C-style" syntax makes it easy to pickup. Once the JVM starts, the performance is great.
Why would I choose Java - is it the most popular language out there right now? If not, it's gotta be damn close, so if I'm building a product I might choose this because it would be the easiest to hire developers for.
Why did I choose Java - because it's what I know best.
Why would I choose Java? If I happened to have a team of replaceable code monkeys developers that knew Java better than anything else, that is probably what I'd go with.
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What do you think the next evolution of languages will look like?
You might assume C and C++ are being "phased out" and that Java/.Net/Python/whatever is an "advance" or the "next stop".
They are all used heavily (see the number C or C++ of tags on this site). The difference is that neither one is the lingua-franca of the programming world anymore. It used to be that the majority of apps were desktop or DOS apps on systems with very limited resources, furthermore all the major desktop APIs were written in C or C++. So everyone learned these.
Now its more complex. Languages are becomming more application specific. C/C++ for when performance is important. Scripting languages for when your main performance hit is db reads/writes. Java and .Net for generic, non-performance-critical desktop apps.
Its the same thing with computer or electrical engineering. In the past these were huge fields at the highest level of abstraction available. Now we have all sorts of higher levels of abstraction. Still, we need people to do this lower-level kind of engineering. They are still in demand. In the same manner, C will continue to be used in many environments, as will C++. You'd be crazy, for instance, to think that you could write a device driver in Java, you'd also be mildly crazy (but perhaps less so) to write a full fledged GUI app in C if you had the choice and ability to do it in Java or .Net.
Each tool has its purpose. I expect C, C++, and Java to evolve and continue to be used for new and legacy development.
I can't speak for C++ and Java, but C definitely ain't goin' nowhere...
It's pretty much unthinkable to write any kind of operating system kernel without most of it in C (well, you can use assembly language entirely if you are really stubborn :-P).
C is basically a thin wrapper of niceness around assembly language. It's so tightly coupled to a standard Von Neumann CPU architecture that no standard library or runtime is required to implement most of its features: pointers, character strings, automatic variables on the stack, integer arithmetic, etc.
For the same reasons, C is great for user-level applications that absolutely demand high performance, things like multiplying huge matrices or parsing complex languages. It may be a pain to write a parser in C, but the speed and efficiency advantages of manual memory management are hard to pass up...
Alan Kay once said "Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
He is working on changing the future of programming
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." source
Well, I might add that Bjarne once said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
Languages evolve to fill a niche problem that is not covered by other languages.
Weather that language gets a foot hold and establishes itself is another question entirely and has a lot to do with popularity.
What comes next?
The problem I see that needs filling is multi-processors (or multi-cores). Currently all the popular languages have very limited ability to exploit the additional cores. Basically all current popular languages give the developer the very basic objects (threads/locks etc) to use the cores and then leave it up to the developer to try and exploit the parallelism available from multi-cores.
It would be a nice to have a language that abstracted away the concept of cores (even threads) and could automatically exploit the enherant parallelism available from multi-cores/multi-processor architecture. Unfortunately all these languages (that I know about) are still research projects at universities and are unlikely to see real adoption any time soon.
You imply that there was a progression C -> C++ -> Java.
That's a bit artificial, each language represents a method of solving problems and each language has inherent problem domains where it is efficient at solve a problem and other problem domains where that language would be a bad choice.
Personally:
I would never write a device driver with Java.
I would probably not write back-end web module with C (you probably can but not me)
etc.
C# ? -- oh, but that is Java :) (sorry, couldn't resist)
The next generation of languages is already here, Scripting ones. Its no mistake that Microsoft is working on the DLR (dynamic language runtime). I think the future will be interpreted (but JITted), dynamic languages that have few constraints and lots of flexibility.
Performance constraints for the majority of languages are not so important nowadays, or no-one would be writing Java or C# apps at all, but considering CPUs are super-fast, and RAM is cheap, we don't notice the inefficiencies of these higher-level designs (eg if you have a 1mhz cpu, you write your code in C, not C#. If you have a CPU running at 3Ghz, you write it whatever you like)
So.. Ruby, Python, "Dynamic-C#"... these are the future. When MS releases the DLR, expect a lot of interest in it, expect a lot of companies to start talking about programmer productivity as the most important part of most application development.
After that.... probably a GUI-driven system where you connect blocks together in a UML-a-like system and add properties to them that produces generated code.
I believe the answer is twofold.
First, client side applications are more and more implemented as browser based applications. To give a browser based application a look and feel comparable to rich desktop application you need something like Javascript. And if you followed the news a bit you see a tremendous effort towards speeding up the javascript implementation in browsers, and a flourishing ecosystem of libraries which help you create a responsive, intuitive GUI with javascript in a browser.
So, for GUIs I believe the future is Javascript.
For the backend, the server, I very much doubt that the near future has a scripted language in store. Server-side software tends to live for years and years, features added, bugs fixed and all. The language in which that is written needs to be not so much fast to write, but easy to read (maintain).
And scripted languages tend to be a bit more difficult to understand if you revisit your code after a year or two to fix that bug. That has (in my opinion) two primary reasons which will not go away in the short term:
IDEs have trouble giving hints with dynamic languages
In the context your working there is by definition less context information available; in Java you know you can only get type X. In a scripted language you should check all referencing code, not easy in a large project
These problems can be mitigated by using very experienced developers, but if, in the future, the only kind of usefull developer is a experienced one we won't need to hire inexperienced ones, which will give trouble in the future.
For those reasons I believe the next-gen server-side language is statically typed. And from the statically typed languages I think C# and Java have the best chances due to the enormous amount of usefull libraries available and the very readable nature of those languages.
As other have mentioned, languages tend to adapt around new technologies and trends. So in order to answer that question, you first have to look at the overall future of computers and see what languages are most suitable for these purposes.
For example, to use your language progression as an example, in the beginning (:-)) there was a need for a language that would make maximum use of the limited resources available, C fit the bill in that regard. As time went on, and the spectrum of software applications incresed there was a greater demand for OO based languages in order to facilitate software reuse, easier design etc. and C++ / Java became popular.
Currently, there is an increased drift in the industry towards server side components that do all the work with thin client UIs (i.e. browsers). So languages that cater for this demand are becomming more popular (Ruby, ASP/Java EE languages).
New languages will become popular when the technology that they are closest to become popular.
Personally (and this is guesswork), I think there is huge scope for a language that truly takes advantage of multi-core systems. This will mean having multi-threading built from the very start and will probably require a change in approach and thinking (like going from procedural to OO).
It's going on a couple years old now, but Tim Sweeney's The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective is an interesting cogitation on the subject.
What is the future of programming? Away from languages as we know them.
It's 2009 and we're still using text editors? With the project I'm a part of you can build entire applications simply by setting attributes. Outside of (mainly mathematical) expressions and string values, there's not a line of text anywhere.
One of the developers complained that "you can't print out the code," and I replied, "Would a company print out its entire accounting structure? Or would it print out the aspects it wants to see, such as Cashflow Statements and Balance Sheets?" It's only when we move out into new abstraction mechanisms that we can really move ahead.
The future of programming remains to be seen, but I think there are some exciting developments happening that will finally release us from the C/C++/Java harness we've had on for so long.
At some point programs will start writing their own programs making humans redundant as far as programming is concerned. The major disagreement is when this will happen.
If you follow only this branch of programming language history, I think one can write both JavaScript and C#, since they came after the three you mention, share a similar syntax, and took from the predecessors.
Others might mention D or Objective-C (they are already here, of course).
By next language, I suppose you mean "next successful", because there is almost a new language each month...
I think it will be a language with garbage collection, running on bytecode with Jit, highly portable.
I can't tell if it will be object-oriented or functional, with static or dynamic typing, but I would bet on a mix, like does the interesting Fan Programming Language.
Or maybe we are all wrong, it might just a natural language, with spoken or graphical interface: "Take the weather box of this page, change its color and this logo to that, and integrate in my page".
What would be great, in my opinion, is a language like C++ with a more compact definition, better standard library, native garbage collection, and native synchronization constructs. It should be usable by relative novices, but still provide facilities for experts to program in an efficient, low-level way when needed. I believe D meets most of these criteria, but it seems unlikely to me that it will take hold.
On the short term, I expect high level languages to become more powerful and more used. Perl 6 and Javascript 2.0 are good examples of what awaits us.
On the long term, functional languages might make it into the mainstream, but I expect that will not happen any time soon.
D language, especially the 2.0 version has learnt from Ruby, Python and lots of modern languages without keeping source compatibility with C, still allowing for raw access to the metal. The design decisions of this language are a perfect solution for next-generation system and general programming languages, with even functional programming and metaprogramming built-in.
The language question is in my opinion no either or. It allways depends on your application. And since languages have mostly a standard set of libraries that are well suited for this or that application. Languages are tied somewhat to a particular application field.
For Example:
C -> Device drivers
C++ -> Highperformance Computing
Java -> Server side programs (J2EE)
C# -> Server, Client(Silverlight, WinForm, WPF)
Ruby, Python, ... -> WebScripting (Serverside) and helper scripts
ECMAScript (Javascript) -> WebScripting (Clientside)
I think any of these languages are capable to solve any computing program (also performance wise since we have Jits) but they are not used in any field since it is not feasible to recreate every library for every language.
On thing that makes C and C++ special is, that there is a standard library but compared to the others it is a rather minimalistic standard library. To use those languages efficiently 3rd party (non-standard) libraries are needed.
So when choosing a language for a project you look for these things:
Are there the right libraries you can use in your project
Do you know the language
Is it efficient to programm in this language (look at brainfuck)
Does your team know and master the language?
The last thing is also do you like the language? At the end that is the biggest motivation to use this or that language.
So the next step in language evolution will be higher level libraries and concepts to be faster and more expressive. Examples are
Lambda expressions
Linq (C# feature to do sort of sql in the language)
functional programming
variable typing
dynamic typing
not particular language: better IDEs that assists the programmer
Important: Support for easy! parallelism (Axum, Nesl, orca, Chapel, ... ) Here list