Despite some surface differences, Kotlin and Java are so similar that "losing" one to the other isn't really that big a change. They run on the same platforms and they use the same frameworks, dependencies, debuggers, and other tooling.

A Java developer will pick up Kotlin much faster than, say, a Postgres developer will pick up Mongo. It takes a lot longer for a Java programmer to learn the Android environment than the Kotlin language.

If there were a trend from Java towards Rust or Go or Python, that would be a significant change in the world. If Java were to vanish tomorrow and everybody had to pick up Kotlin, the world would be pretty much the same in a week. Kotlin is nice, benefitting from a clean-sheet implementation of lessons that Java takes on only with difficulty, but it's not a wholesale break.

They are tools used by programmers. They do, in fact, have languages of their own, but more to the point they have whole ecosystems of expected behaviors, idioms, best practices, etc etc etc. Those take longer to learn than a programming language.

Similarly, "web app" isn't a programming language, and neither is "server side". But they are toolkits that a developer must learn on top of their programming language, and it takes longer than the actual language itself.

> There's no such thing as Postgres or Mongo developer.

That's very much not true. I've personally done contracts for developing PostgreSQL related code and/or PostgreSQL based projects.

PL/pgSQL says otherwise

What, pray tell, do you think the "L" in "DSL" represents?

Same as "L" in "HTML". Does that make XML a programming language?

My point is - DSL and programming language can overlap. However they don't have to.

I would argue that XML is a non-turing complete declarative programming language.

Daemon Specific Logos might be found in the appendix of the Inquisitor's Guide.

True, but I don't think Java is declining, I just think Python and JavaScript grew beyond Java. But I really doubt that the use of JavaScript and Python that took on replaced the use of Java, I think it's just new use cases. I haven't looked at the data, but ya, I'd doubt Java is declining.

P.S.: Also I say Java, but I mean JVM, I club all JVM languages together, since that's more what I care about, is the strength of the Java ecosystem.

And in the cloud native world everything is on the Go track. Java were huge for big enterprise monoliths, but it seems like this is not what we are heading for in the future.

There is work being done for native (AOT) Java deployments.

True, but Go is far ahead in this important domain and it is an open question whether Java can catch up.

Java has AOT compiler support since around 2000, 20 years, Go should take care to catch up with generics instead.

It just wasn't available as free beer, so it tends to be ignored by the FOSS crowds.

Java is nowhere close losing the #1/2 spot in programming language, it's just everywhere.

It's already #3 according to some rankings out there, behind JavaScript and Python. It's growth that will be the deciding factor.

I agree that Java is not going anywhere, but I could absolutely see a world where JavaScript and Python are number one and two.

According to that Stack Overflow survey, JavaScript and Python are currently number one and two respectively.

After Excel

Ya, but the ranking don't really matter, the usage does. It's possible Java grew year over year and yet lost rank.

I certainly agree that language rankings don’t really matter. In very broad strokes, “used everywhere,” “used many places,” “used some places,” “pretty niche,” “academic only,” these kinds of things are more useful than arguing which is 5 vs 6.

Well on GitHub this is already the case since quite some time.