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.
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I think that .NET will be used more and more instead of Java, because C# is similar to it, but better¹. And there is also F# which is great too². Rust and JS³ might also get some more usage in backend.
¹The only thing missing is union type.
²And has union type :D.
³And that's unfortunate because I don't like JS.
It has nothing to do with "being better", it is mostly about a corrupt ecosystem and developers not even realizing what happening.
Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don’t require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the “sharp angles” between multiple solutions that aren’t related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they’re easier to replace and you’ll pay less taxes;
To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy
You're saying this as it is a bad thing when it is not though; better defined APIs and ecosystems that lift cognitive load from you is always a good thing, there is no way to spin that as a negative.
I think dotnet offers an incredibly good ecosystem for development, and I say this as someone that wants to jump ship and change the stack. What pains me the most about the stack is nothing technical. It's not even the past predatory moves of microsoft, but the developer culture that surrounds it. Most dotnet devs I've worked with and talked to seem to be people that simply use visual studio as a window to the rest of the world. They tend to have very poor knowledge about almost everything with barely any fundamentals.
Not sure I follow your point about open source; I think everything we use at work is open source already. Everything is on github and there are quite a lot of discussions in how to steer the language and ecosystem being made in the wide open. It reminds me of the openjdk and python ecosystems. Third party libraries are all open source and have been since almost forever. There is still some closed source culture but not much.
I'm just saying that Microsoft created a self perpetuating (negative?) feedback loop when it comes to software development that essentially takes all the "hard parts" of programming and replaces them with services so anyone with little experience can deliver useful software products. That in turns allows for consulting companies to hire more cheap labor and reinforces the need to by into MS ecosystem that will be developed (improved?) even further in this direction...