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Beyond Java: A Glimpse at the Future of Programming Languages 1st Edition

by Bruce Tate (Author)
3.4 3.4 out of 5 stars 24 ratings
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Bruce Tate, author of the Jolt Award-winning Better, Faster, Lighter Java has an intriguing notion about the future of Java, and it's causing some agitation among Java developers. Bruce believes Java is abandoning its base, and conditions are ripe for an alternative to emerge.

In Beyond Java, Bruce chronicles the rise of the most successful language of all time, and then lays out, in painstaking detail, the compromises the founders had to make to establish success. Then, he describes the characteristics of likely successors to Java. He builds to a rapid and heady climax, presenting alternative languages and frameworks with productivity and innovation unmatched in Java. He closes with an evaluation of the most popular and important programming languages, and their future role in a world beyond Java.

If you are agree with the book's premise--that Java's reign is coming to an end--then this book will help you start to build your skills accordingly. You can download some of the frameworks discussed and learn a few new languages. This book will teach you what a new language needs to succeed, so when things do change, you'll be more prepared. And even if you think Java is here to stay, you can use the best techniques from frameworks introduced in this book to improve what you're doing in Java today.

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  1. ISBN-10
    0596100949
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0596100940
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    November 1, 2005
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6 x 0.51 x 9 inches
  8. Print length
    200 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bruce Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, father, author, and Java programmer in Austin, Texas. His five books include Better, Faster, Lighter Java and the bestselling Bitter Java (Manning). His 17 years of experience include stints at IBM, two failed startups, and his own independent consulting practice called J2Life, LLC.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (November 1, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0596100949
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0596100940
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.51 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.4 3.4 out of 5 stars 24 ratings

About the author

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Bruce Tate

Bruce Tate

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Bruce Tate is an avid adventurer who enjoys kayaking rivers, indoor climbing, and boating. He is a prominent figure in the Elixir programming language community as a speaker, author, editor, and conference organizer. Bruce Tate's contributions in the field of programming education have made a significant impact nationally and beyond.

The programmer and CEO of Groxio is helping to redefine how computer languages are taught and learned. In 2022, he captained one of the roughly 200 boats to complete America's Great Loop with his wife Maggie. The journey of 6,700 miles spanned two countries, eighteen states, and nine months.

Professionally, he is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books including best-selling Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Designing Elixir Systems with OTP, and Programming Phoenix. He was involved with the Elixir and Ruby languages early in their adoption curves.

Currently, when he's not on the water, he lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with his wife and his dog Yeti.

Customer reviews

3.4 out of 5 stars
24 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jared Richardson
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for the big picture
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2005
Who should read this book?

Anyone who writes Java for a living. In fact, anyone who works with code and also looks ahead of the game to see where things are headed next. Bruce has said that he's really good at seeing things from 10,000 feet high. This book gives you that type of high-level perspective but then it layers in practical application.

What's the big picture?

Bruce starts with the environment and situation that helped Java get started and then helped it thrive. He then talks about where Java is today, where it's headed, and how the situation parallels the early days of Java. He shows how the time is ripe for a new disruptive technology to emerge. Java continue to focus on the enterprise, and it's doing very well there, but the barrier to entry to for the new developer is getting ever higher. As Java gets more and more complex, the time is becoming more ripe for a new low-end replacement. Something that easy to use, easy to get started with and easy to become very productive with.

There's an good overview of a number of languages ranging from Perl to PHP to Smalltalk and where each one is positioned in the market. Bruce comes down hard on the side of Ruby, Rails and continuations... or at least hard on the side of the next big thing sharing a lot of the same traits those technologies bring to the table.

What's to like?

There are several parts of this book I really enjoyed.

I liked the historical overview of the Java language in it's early days. I worked in Smalltalk long enough ago to remember some of the history. The perspective of Microsoft's role in the rise of Java was also refreshingly honest instead of the obligatory Microsoft bashing so many books include.

There is an entire chapter devoted to introducing you to Ruby, another for Rails and a third for continuation servers. Each of the introduction chapters was excellent. Very well written and easy to follow. I've actually gone through the Ruby snippets in the book and been able to run them all. I consider the sign of a good book when I am pulled in enough to actually run the code samples.

What's not to like??

The book is about half history and half future with a strong bent towards Bruce's vision of the future. If you see what Bruce sees and agree, you'll love this book. If you don't agree with where Bruce sees the industry headed then I think you'll get annoyed by the Ruby focus. But I can't complain about anything else in the book. I really liked it.

What's the Summary?

What were the factors that led to Java's rise? Are those factors in play again to bring another technology to the forefront? If so, what will that new technology look like? How can I get a head start with the new technology?
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Michael Vanier
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but narrowly-focussed, error-ridden and frequently annoying
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2006
There is a lot to like in this book, and a lot not to like. I'll talk about the negatives first and then discuss the positives.

The style of the book is extremely annoying. The author is a kayaker and a mountain biker, and he introduces each chapter with a kayaking/mountain biking story meant to serve as some kind of analogy to the programming topics he'll cover in the chapter. I found this unnecessary and distracting (I don't need sugar coating on my technical reading), and it felt like the real purpose of the stories was for the author to demonstrate how cool he is. In addition, the author uses the phrase "a perfect storm" over and over and over to describe the factors that led to Java's position of dominance in the programming world. I hated that expression even before I read the book; it has to be the most abused expression of the last few years.

Despite the fact that the book is ostensibly about programming languages, the author is by no means an expert on the subject. To his credit, he admits this freely, but he also makes numerous small and not-so-small mistakes when describing programming language features which may lead more knowledgeable readers to wonder if he's really qualified to write this book. For instance, in several places he describes the advantages of static typing as being mainly for early error detection, without also pointing out another big advantage of static typing: faster code (there are other advantages as well). In another place he makes the blatantly false statement that "Smalltalk is where all the continuation research is happening", ignoring the fact that Scheme (a Lisp dialect) has had continuations since 1986, and that there has been and continues to be active research on continuations in Scheme ever since. Then he says that "In Lisp, everything is a list." Wrong again. He also seems to assume that statically-typed programs will always be verbose, indicating that he is unfamiliar with statically-typed languages like Objective Caml which have type inference. The bottom line is that he often doesn't know what he's talking about when he compares the features of different programming languages.

The author's programming expertise appears to be primarily in the domain of small to medium-sized web applications. This is an important domain, but it's far from the only programming domain. So the book's subtitle "A Glimpse At the Future of Programming Languages" should really be "A Glimpse At the Future of Programming Languages for People Who Exclusively Write Small to Medium-Sized Web Applications and Nothing Else". If you want a broader picture, or are primarily interested in another domain, look elsewhere.

The author is clearly aiming the book at programmers who primarily program for money. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but given the author's expressed fondness for open source software (which I share) it might have been nice to acknowledge that some people also write programs for the joy of it in addition to (or in lieu of) the financial rewards.

Now that I've covered the bad, let's look at the good. The author seems to know his domain well, and he makes a good case that Java frameworks for writing web applications have gotten so baroque and tedious that they are simply miserable to use and lead to very slow development cycles. This might be just the fault of the frameworks and not the language, but the author makes a good case that specific language features (or the lack thereof) are what make Java so clumsy for writing web applications. He contrasts Java primarily with the Ruby language, and specifically with the Ruby on Rails web framework, and shows that several features of Ruby make for a much more productive programmer experience. For instance, Ruby's ability to express configuration information inside the language obviates the need for much of the XML that clutters up Java web applications. The author spends a lot of time discussing Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities and how they make it possible to write much more concise code with much less repetition. An example is a class which reads from a database and populates itself on-the-fly with methods to access specific database fields. (Small gripe: the term "metaprogramming" has a variety of semi-related meanings, all coming down to the notion of code being automatically generated instead of being written by hand, but the way that e.g. Lisp or Scheme macros or C++ templates represent metaprogramming is very different from Ruby's metaprogramming, and the author doesn't discuss that.)

The most interesting chapter by far is the chapter on continuation servers. The author gives a clear (though short) description of continuations, which is no mean feat given that they are one of the most difficult-to-explain concepts in the entire universe of programming languages. More importantly, he discusses how they turn out to be extremely useful in web servers, allowing web-based programs to be written in a much more natural and concise style than is possible without them. He uses the Smalltalk language as an example, because there is a continuation server written in Smalltalk. (Another gripe: while I'm happy to see him acknowledge that Smalltalk is a good language, I might have liked it better if he also mentioned that the Scheme dialect of Lisp also has continuations (as I mentioned above), and that there is also a web server in PLT Scheme that is also continuation-based).

The take-home message of the book is that writing small to medium-sized web apps in Java is rapidly becoming more trouble than it's worth, that more dynamic languages like Ruby have features that make it much easier, and that therefore there is a good chance that these languages will take over much of the programmer mindshare. I agree with all of these points, and think that today's Java web programmers are well advised to look at other programming languages. However, I also feel on general principles that all programmers would do well to learn another programming language every year or two, so for me this book just reinforces my pre-existing view.

On the other hand, the author mentions, but doesn't emphasize the fact that the JVM has many capabilities which far outstrip those available in Ruby or Python or indeed most other languages. He does point out that many advanced features of Java frameworks are only useful for very large scale web
applications (the domain that J2EE targets explicitly), and are unnecessary for the majority of (smaller scale) web applications. He leaves open the extremely important question of whether frameworks like Ruby on Rails will scale well to larger applications, or to smaller applications when they need to grow larger, though he seems to believe that they will (if not now, then later when the language and its implementation or implementations mature).

In summary, I think this book is a decent read with a lot of food for thought, if you can handle the irritating style, the mistakes and the omissions. This book is far from the last word on this subject (the reader should be aware that there are lots of interesting computer languages that are not even mentioned in this book, with Objective Caml and E being two obvious candidates), but it's interesting nonetheless.
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Shahzad Bhatti
2.0 out of 5 stars Not very insightful -- only touches surface
Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2005
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I was hoping that Bruce will have more insightful comparison of upcoming languages and will compare Java's shortcomings against them. Instead, he covered only major shortcomings of Java that most people already know such as not purely object oriented, edit-compile-test cycle or how massive it has become. Though, he talks about Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Lisp, but it is very clear from beginning that the only language that he likes is Ruby and does not provide enough details on other languages. I myself have been learning Ruby over a year and have been trying Ruby on Rails lately and I like it a lot and I agree that productivity on Ruby is much higher than Java. It's just that I was hoping to learn a bit about other new languages and how they tackle different issues especially that make domain driven modeling a bit easier similar to "Naked objects" features. I for one doing Java programming since '96 and having gone through all Java->CORBA-Servlets->EJB-Spring cycle am looking for alternatives. Certainly, Ruby comes to mind and it is going to have support for VM and AOP support in 2.0, but I am still not convinced that it is the answer. Overall, I wished the author had researched a bit more about other interesting ways people are solving these problems.
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Todd A. Hartle
4.0 out of 5 stars Java is not in your future!
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2006
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Great overview of where the industry is headed from a language standpoint. I've always said that Java is Complex but something like Ruby on Rails is ADVANCED! Would have like to seen CFML (i.e. ColdFusion) included as one fo the alternatives.
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Top reviews from other countries

Exiled-Edik
3.0 out of 5 stars Somewhat dated
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 7, 2013
Verified Purchase
Pros
Rightly critiqued Generics as a kludgy bolt-on.
Highlighted the closure issue (but not nearly enough)
Had a go at critiquing the JVM (or at least how Sun viewed it)!
Emphasised the Syntactic Sugary nature of Java (a pet hate).
Expressed disdain at the API expansion (which never seems to end).

Cons
No mention of Scala (which was on the JVM early '04).
Too much Ruby love.. yuk.
As has been mentioned the Artsy intro's were a distraction.
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