Why are people clinging to Java when there are other, better languages for development that work on the JVM with their legacy Java codes? In this session, we will unpack a little why this is by taking a small example and showing that Java really isn’t the language you want to program with.

Java has been around since the early 1990s. With it came the JVM. Both evolve very slowly; slower than improvements in software development technologies and processes. The JVM’s slow evolution isn’t much of a problem, as its role is to commoditize hardware. It has been successful at doing so for long running server-like programs, and less so in the command line tool arena dominated by Python, Bash, etc.

Java, at least in it’s role as a server-side language, has been quite successful. However, it is old, it looks
old, and it is not able to evolve to stay relevant. We have had, over the years, a succession of languages
with the most famous being Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, but there are many, many more, such as Frege, Fantom, Gosu, etc. that could be used. We’ll dive deep into this during this talk.