In this panel discussion from QCon San Francisco, several influential leaders of the software development community (Joshua Bloch, Chet Haase, Rod Johnson, Erik Meijer and Charles Nutter) discussed and debated the future of the Java language and APIs based upon the lessons we have learned from the past. Topics included static versus dynamic languages, removing code from Java, forking the JVM, and the next big programming language.
Watch QCon Panel: What will the Future of Java Development Be? (54 minutes).
The panel addressed many questions, including:
- How do you see the APIs growing in the future?
- Can we modify the Java platform to utilize a core library with pluggable modules?
- Does the Java Kernel/Java 6 Update N project create this core/plugins architecture for Java?
- Do we ever want to remove code from the Java APIs, or create a new modular platform within Java?
- Is the download size of Java really that big of an issue?
- Are there plans to add core/plugin-type modularity to Java?
- Aren't there existing examples of Java platforms with varying APIs and functionality? Why can't we add more?
- Do you think the Java platform is already too complex?
- With dynamic typing, do you lose information that would otherwise allow development tools to help you with e.g. refactoring?
- What are the pros and cons of static versus dynamic languages?
- Should we add features like closures and XML literals to Java?
- Shouldn't programmers be able to understand and utilize new language features? Aren't we supposed to be intelligent?
- Does this mean that we will have to move to languages like Ruby to get the latest language features, and that changes to Java will eventually stop?
- Does the average developer have any say in how Java evolves?
- Is C# evolving too quickly?
- How can the community help to determine the features that go into Java?
- How does adding features affect the complexity of a language?
- If you have to use a rich IDE or some other tool in order to be able to program in a language, isn't that a bad sign?
- How will the next programming language change the way we look at programming?
