What are your opinions on the future of back-end web development? Is the Java ecosystem going to wither away as more modern and better solutions are emerging and maturing?
If so, which language/framework and/or programming paradigm do you think will become the new dominant player and how soon?
Personally I would love to see Rust becoming a new standard, it’s a pleasure to write and has a rapidly growing ecosystem, I don’t think it’s far away from overtaking Java. The biggest hurdle imo is big corporations taking a pretty big risk by choosing a relatively new language that’s harder to learn compared to what has been the standard for decades.
Playing it safe means you minimize surprises and have a very large amount of people that are already experts in the language.
Taking the risk will definitely improve a lot of things given that you find enough people that know or are willing to learn Rust, but it also means that you’re trading off Java flaws with Rust flaws. That’s the case however with every big change, and Java flaws are a good enough reason to make a big change.
Well just program a little bit more Rust, at some point you don’t want to look back haha. It’s almost like a curse for me, I can’t really enjoy programming in another language anymore (ok not completely true, but at least the major languages I had to use before like C# or Typescript etc. feel dirty and limiting now ^^). I would enjoy something like Haskell with better tooling anonymous sets, less laziness and a slightly more opinionated syntax though (having all kinds of weird operators sometimes looks a little bit brainfuck). Sometimes Rust is a little bit boiler-platy and gets complex when you’re overusing fancy trait-based generic code (but it’s kinda fun, you can do a lot of fancy stuff with traits), and often the type system is limited compared to Haskells, if you’re approaching higher-kinded types territory…