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I am not sure if this question is correct, but I am asking to resolve the doubts I have.
For Machine Learning/Data Mining, we need to learn about data, which means you need to learn Hadoop, which has implementation in Java for MapReduce(correct me if I am wrong).
Hadoop also provides streaming api to support other languages(like python)
Most grad students/researchers I know solve ML problems in python
we see job posts for hadoop and Java combination very often
I observed that Java and Python(in my observation) are most widely used languages for this domain.
My question is what is most popular language for working on this domain.
what factors involve in deciding which language/framework one should choose
I know both Java and python but confused always :
whether I start programming in Java(because of hadoop implementation)
whether I start programming in Python(because its easier and quicker to write)
This is a very open ended question, I am sure the advices might help me and people who have same doubt.
Thanks a lot in advance
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the reigning language is MATLAB... I say unfortunately because I neither like nor use this language, I'm much more likely to program in C++/Java. But Data Miners and Machine Learning persons around me tend to stick to MATLAB...
Edit : I've just read a really interesting line in Wikipedia's page on R :
According to Rexer's Annual Data Miner Survey in 2010, R has become
the data mining tool used by more data miners (43%) than any other.
I'm not experienced in Java and Hadoop but I used both Python and MATLAB for machine learning stuff and I use MATLAB more often now. Actually, the important factors for my case are as follows:
Almost all of my colleagues use MATLAB and C++, and very few of them use Python. Their Python usage is limited to general scripting, not particular machine learning stuff. So, when I use Python, the only way to get help is web and we face problems to share code within the lab.
The IDE of MATLAB and its extensive documentation makes it powerful for my case.
You can handle large data sets in MATLAB. link 1 link2
There are many machine learning/data mining libraries written in MATLAB, and most of the libraries written in C++/Java have MATLAB wrappers.
Some points are also true for Python. But as I mentioned, the community I work in plays an important role in deciding the language.
R is an excellent candidate for data mining (certainly) and machine learning as well.
(Generalizations, of course.)
Java and Hadoop are really meaningful in context of seriously big data and/or scaling requirements. Java gives you the libraries and and an army of programmers. Hadoop gives you fairly painless distribution and a growing knowledge base of mapping various algorithms to the framework.
Python seems to have the academics on its side, specially recent graduates who are now active and influential in the professional practice. Also, if you just want to try out stuff, an expressive dynamic language like Python obviously will prove to be quite useful.
Then there is R. (There is a lot more, but this is the extent of my knowledge /g/)
I think besides the obvious focus on data that R brings to the table (and thus a community of data geeks to help out with the science part as well), it is a delightfully lightweight system and not too shabby at all in terms of libraries as well.
That said, one would think the (~) functional languages (Scala, Clojure on JVM; Haskell, etc.) would be quite a good fit for manipulating data and working on huge datasets.
I think in this field most popular combination is Java/Hadoop. When vacancies requires also python/perl/ruby it usually means that they are migrating from those script languages(usually main languages till that time) to java due to moving from startup code base to enterprise.
Also in real world data mining application python is frequently used for prototyping, small sized data processing tasks.
Python is gaining in popularity, has a lot of libraries, and is very useful for prototyping. I find that due to the many versions of python and its dependencies on C libs to be difficult to deploy though.
R is also very popular, has a lot of libraries, and was designed for data science. However, the underlying language design tends to make things overcomplicated.
Personally, I prefer Clojure because it has great data manipulation support and can interop with Java ecosystem. The downside of it currently is that there aren't too many data science libraries yet!
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.
link text
I just started exploring Scala in my free time.
I have to say that so far I'm very impressed. Scala sits on top of the JVM, seamlessly integrates with existing Java code and has many features that Java doesn't.
Beyond learning a new language, what's the downside to switching over to Scala?
Well, the downside is that you have to be prepared for Scala to be a bit rough around the edges:
you'll get the odd cryptic Scala compiler internal error
the IDE support isn't quite as good as Java (neither is the debugging support)
there will be breaks to backwards compatibility in future releases (although these will be limited)
You also have to take some risk that Scala as a language will fizzle out.
That said, I don't think you'll look back! My experiences are positive overall; the IDE's are useable, you get used to what the cryptic compiler errors mean and, whilst your Scala codebase is small, a backwards-compatibility break is not a major hassle.
It's worth it for Option, the monad functionality of the collections, closures, the actors model, extractors, covariant types etc. It's an awesome language.
It's also of great personal benefit to be able to approach problems from a different angle, something that the above constructs allow and encourage.
Some of the downsides of Scala are not related at all to the relative youth of the language. After all, Scala, has about 5 years of age, and Java was very different 5 years into its own lifespan.
In particular, because Scala does not have the backing of an enterprise which considers it a strategic priority, the support resources for it are rather lacking. For example:
Lack of extensive tutorials
Inferior quality of the documentation
Non-existing localization of documentation
Native libraries (Scala uses Java or .NET libraries as base for their own)
Another important difference is due to how Sun saw Java and EPFL sees Scala. Sun saw Java as a product to get enterprise customers. EPFL sees Scala as a language intended to be a better language than existing ones, in some particular respects (OOxFunctional integration, and type system design, mostly).
As a consequence, where Sun made JVM glacially-stable, and Java fully backward compatible, with very slow deprecation and removal of features (actually, removal?), JAR files generated with one version of Scala won't work at all with other versions (a serious problem for third party libraries), and the language is constantly getting new features as well as actually removing deprecated ones, and so is Scala's library. The revision history for Scala 2.x, which I think is barely 3 years old, is impressive.
Finally, because of all of the above, third party support for Scala is incipient. But it's important to note, though, that JetBrains, which makes money out of selling the IntelliJ IDEA IDE, has supported Scala for quite some time, and keeps improving its support. That means, to me, that there is demand for third party support, and support is bound to increase.
I point to the book situation. One year ago there was no Scala book on the market. Right now there are two or three introductory Scala books on the market, about the same number of books should be out before the end of the year, and there is a book about a very important web framework based on Scala, Lift.
I bet we'll see a book about ESME not too far in the future, as well as books about Scala and concurrency. The publishing market has apparently reached the tipping point. Once that happens, enterprises will follow.
I was unshackled from the J2EE leash last year wanted to do something new after 12 years of Java in the enterprise building very large system for some of the worlds biggest companies.
I had tried Ruby on Rails in the past. After building a few sample apps I did not like the feel of it or the fact that I would have to write a ton of unit tests to cover stuff that is normally done by a compiler.
Groovy on Grails was my next port of call. I have to say I do like this but it suffers from the same dynamic typing problems as ROR. Don't get me wrong I am not putting Grails down as it is an excellent framework and I will still use it. Each has its own place IMO.
I then jumped on Scala and have now built a hybrid application based on Scala and Spring MVC. At first working with Scala is difficult but it gets easier and more productive the more time you put into it. I've reached a tipping point where I now want to invest time in Lift as well.
The combination of "Programming in Scala" and David Pollak's "Beginning Scala" books is good for learning the language, the latter with a less academic bent.
Scala is still young and has some way to go. I think it has a bright future and I see momentum is already picking up. Recently one of the creators of the Groovy language said in a blog post he would never have bothered designing Groovy if Scala had been around at the time.
I think some more work on better Java API integration/wrapping will give Scala the boost it needs to win more followers. The basic integration is there already but I think its could be polished a bit more.
Yes IDE support is there but it is basic at the moment. The powerfully refactoring support of Intellij is not there yet and I miss that a lot. The compiler + IDE support with a mix of of other plugins is not mature yet. I sometimes get very weird internal compiler errors caused by how Scala sits with JDO enhancement for the Goggle app engine. However these are little things that can be easily fixed. Early adaptation of new technologies and languages always comes with a little pain. But this bit of pain can produce great pleasure in the future.
If I look at the capabilities of Scala compared to early Java its miles ahead. When I moved from C++ to Java the JVM was not ready yet regarding scalability. There used to be lots of weird crash and burn JVM core dumps on various OSes. All of this has now been fixed in Java and the JVM is rock solid. Scals runs in the JVM so it has been given a massive head start on native platform integration. Its standing on the shoulders of giants!
After years of building and supporting enterprise applications my vote is for a language where a compiler can catch most of the non functional bugs before even unit tests are built. I love the type checking mixed with the power of functional programming. I like the fact that I am doing OO++.
I think the development community will decide if Scala is the future or not. The downside of adopting Scala now would be if it did not pick up momentum and adaptation. It would be very difficult to maintain an Scala code base with very few Scala developers around. However I watched Java come from the skunk works into the enterprise to replace C++ and it was all pushed from the bottom up by the developer community. Time will tell for Scala but currently it has my vote.
Beyond learning a new language, what's the downside to switching over
to Scala?
Thinking, thinking, thinking..... nope, there is none :-)
I'll tell you my little personal experience, and how I found that it wasn't so easy to integrate Scala with existing Java libraries:
I wanted to get started with something easy, and as I thought that Scala was very well suited for scientific computation I wanted to do a little wrapper around JAMA (Java Matrix library)... My initial approach was to extend the Matrix type with a Scala class and then overload the arithmetic operators and call the Java native methods, but:
The Matrix class doesn't provide a default constructor (without arguments)
The Scala class needs one primary constructor
I thought one good primary constructor could be the one accepting an Array[Array[Double]] (first thing that sucks, that syntax is much more verbose and hard to read than Double[][])
As far as I know by reading the manuals, the parameters of the primary constructor are also implicitly fields of the class, so I would end with one Array[Array[Double]] in the Scala subclass and another double[][] in the Java superclass, which is pretty redundant.
I think I could have used an empty primary constructor that initialized the superclass with some default values (for example, a [[0]]), or just make an adapter class that used the Jama.Matrix as a delegate, but if a language is supposed to be elegant and seamless integrated with another, that kind of things shouldn't happen.
Those are my two cents.
I don't think there are any downsides. Actually learning new language is very helpful for broadening your programming knowledge. You might gain from Scala such things as generic classes, variance annotations, upper and lower type bounds, inner classes and abstract types as object members, compound types, explicitly typed self references, views, and polymorphic methods.
It consistently breaks backwards compatibilty.
Community size is small.
IDE support isn't there yet.
Otherwise its fine.
It is just a young language, it will get there eventually.
Great for hobbyists, not ready for enterprise.
The two, by which I mean four, biggest downsides I'm seeing are:
Many working as developers in the professional community aren't trained and are unwilling to learn how to use a functional language, they won't even give it a go so they can understand why it's a better approach. This means you'll always be fighting an uphill battle getting adoption until it's mandated at the corporate level.
RDBMS integration is still a bit spotty. Plenty of solutions, but nothing that really sticks out as becoming a standard. For me though, this might be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. JPA2 is a mess and causes more issues than problems it solves. Hibernate criteria queries aren't much better.
IDE support is still lagging, but mostly in the area of debugging at this point. Code inspection is doing pretty good (at least in IntelliJ).
You'll never want to write another line of Java again! Likely you'll want to punch a wall or break something when forced back into the awkward syntax of Java.
The answers here are somewhat dated circa 2022 so I thought that I would contribute with an update. I have been working in a tech company that started using Scala at about the same time this question was originally asked. I recently blogged about lessons learned in that shop when trying to teach Java developers how to work with a code base written in idiomatic Scala so this topic is top-of-mind for me right now.
Just about all of the maturity issues in tooling, educational
collateral, and integration are gone. Version 2 of Scala is just as
rock solid a programming language as version 8 or 11 of Java.
Some of the most obvious advantages in switching to Scala are no longer
relevant because those language features have been added to newer
versions of Java.
Where Scala continues to outshine Java is in terms
of modularity and readability which affords idiomatic Scala as able
to handle code complexity better than Java.
That improved code scalability comes at the cost of a higher
learning curve which makes Scala less attractive to junior developers
who tend to make up the majority of your engineering group.
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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