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Comment by AndrewO | Hacker News Reader

Between Clojure and Scala (and JRuby and Groovy), it seems like there's a lot of potential for people to start using Java-the-platform without having heavily used Java-the-language (I know I'm in that situation). I think there's an opportunity for a book or blog-series that would get people familiar with the good and/or necessary legacy aspects of the ecosystem.

What do the more seasoned Java-ers (Javites? Java-ists?) think will remain most relevant from Java-the-language and the existing environment?

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It varies; you'll want to know quite a bit of Java for Scala and Groovy but less so for Clojure, in my opinion. Clojure has a quite distinct flavor and you see things like ring being used instead of servlets directly in compojure, etc. It'll be interesting to see how much of the standard Java toolkit gets reinvented due to distaste for the Java-ness of some of the stack (which isn't necessarily a bad thing.)

Practically speaking, I think you'll need to be at least a competent Java programmer for the next few years if you don't plan on reimplementing a lot of bits that are in the extended Java stack.

"What do the more seasoned Java-ers (Javites? Java-ists?) think will remain most relevant from Java-the-language and the existing environment?"

If you can package your code up in a jar file, in a way that the "API" you want to export is easily callable from Java, then you can deploy to pretty much any platform and every other language on the JVM will be able to interact with your library. Beyond that, learn to read Javadoc well enough so that you can download an arbitrary jar file and call the classes and methods that you need from the language of your choice.

That should take you a pretty far.

"Java-ers (Javites? Java-ists?)"

We prefer "cubicle dwelling code monkeys." Or just "Blubbers."

I think there is plenty of evidence that you don't need to touch java the language now.

However, if you need to interop with existing libraries or between languages (not specifically java language) then it is probably worthwhile at least understanding how interfaces work in java (and most languages would allow you to define them in their own language) - as that is often used at the edges of systems (and its also pretty simple).

Wouldn't you need to know the system programming language to make full use of your platform? It's hard to be write good Unix software without knowing C, for example. I don't know about others, but I need to visualize the cost of each language construct and be aware of more things than exposed by the language itself.

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