As Hemingway penned at the end of The Sun Also Rises, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

I've got no love lost for Java (I use JSF in my day job), but it isn't going the way of Cobol. Java continues to reinvent itself, be it Applets -> J2EE -> Struts -> JSF or it's most recent use for interactive menus in Blu-ray disks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Java_software_supp...)

To further the point, here's one guy's list of Ten Amazing Java Applications. http://java.dzone.com/tips/ten-amazing-java-applications

Personally, I think JPC is pretty darn cool. I'm lukewarm about others and downright hostile to ThinkFree (uh yeah, if by "free" you mean spending lots of money).

At some point we have to stop and consider: what, exactly, is "the way of Cobol"?

Obviously "like Cobol" doesn't mean "useless". A hell of a lot of vital applications are still running in Cobol. Indeed, I'm sure that one way to locate a vital application is to look for one that is still running in Cobol.

And I seriously doubt that "the way of Cobol" really means "completely stagnant". Just because I don't notice the work that the world's Cobol hackers do doesn't mean that it isn't real. If nothing else, you would think that the Cobol folks have had to quietly and heroically build many, many things over the years just to make sure that available modern hardware and infrastructure can support their ancient codebase. For example, we all know that they had to reinvent all the date-formatting code a few years ago, right? That one even I have heard of.

What "the way of Cobol" means is "things happen, but nobody cares". The remaining Cobol code is very important, but folks don't go out of their way to create much more of it. There are people still inventing things in the Cobol universe, but they go quietly about their jobs with a minimum of fuss and marketing and absolutely no mentions in the popular press. It is intensely unfashionable, kids don't learn about it, and language designers make jokes about it.

Java's not there yet, but you can see the handwriting on the wall. It won't last another twenty years as, e.g., the de facto standard language for college students.

"The way of Cobol" sounds like a kung-fu style; perhaps something akin to Drunken Master Style. Or some strange Battlestar Galatical ethical mandate ("To behave ethically Captain Apollo, one must conform to The Way Of Cobol").

I take your point tho. However, it seems to me there's something inherently snarky and pejorative about comparing anything to Cobol. I'm a big enough man to admit that those might be my own anti-Cobol biases coming out. You couldn't pay me any amount of money to write Cobol apps. Perhaps my son 20 years from now will be saying the same thing about Java.

So, question. I often see people claiming that Ruby is replacing Java in some domains, but I don't often see the same thing said of Python.

Is Ruby (the language itself, not the implementation) somehow seen as "ahead" of Python in some way? Why isn't the same thing said about Python?

Or is it all hype and the Python folks are pragmatic enough to stay out of such arguments?

Java has become a system language like C. It runs everywhere, on everything, but DHH has a point when he says it's not relevant. Java will proabably be better known as the underlying runtime system for (J)Ruby in a few years time. ;-)

Yawn