Apparently Java is becoming the new Cobol. It comes as no surprise that .Net has emerged as the contender to to Java’s throne – especially given the Miucrosoft muscle supporting and driving it. It is also pleasing to see that Ruby and Rails is emerging as a contender also. It is also pleasing to see that Microsoft are supporting the development of Ruby with its IronRuby effort to allow Ruby to run on a .Net platform.

However, Java like Cobol has built a lot of infrastructure in enterprise environments and I’m sure that this will give Java some stickiness for considerable time yet.

Reading that article makes me wonder if it will become harder and harder for new languages and computing paradigms to emerge as time goes on? Does each new language or platform need to build a weight of infrastructural components in order for it to be a successful contender for the throne? I hope not and hopefully Ruby is the latest example of a language that works and is popularised simply because developers love it!