The essence of the theory is that the more oil we find, the more we suck out of the ground every year, and because oil isn’t renewable (not in our lifetime anyway) at some point the amount we suck out starts to decrease rather than increase. But, we are told, this decrease isn’t a period of steady decline where we all start running our SUVs on vegetable oil, it’s exponential which means production will fall rapidly until the amount of energy needed to dig it up is greater than the energy you get from the oil itself. At this point, no one can get hold of any oil which means the world will come to a grinding halt and we all strip to our loincloths, become feral savages and start building wattle and daub huts in the hills. Grrr.

But I digress.

Java developers have had it good for years and right now it’s boom time. It’s top of the heap in the latest popularity index, there are more Java jobs on www.jobserve.com, www.monster.co.uk and www.jobsite.co.uk than any other language and they pay more. Even Universities are teaching it to freshmen*.

Now, here are your typical skills a Java developer needs experience of these days on your average ‘enterprise’ project:

• Java (’core’)
• JMS
• JDBC
• Struts
• JSP/Servlets
• Hibernate
• Spring
• XML/XSLT
• Ant
• Eclipse/IntelliJ

That’s some barrier to entry and it’s getting higher all the time, with the increase in popularity of SOA and Web Services, AJAX, and no doubt several other ‘new’ frameworks and enterprise patterns which I’ve yet to hear about. Here’s a picture:

I think Java-based production is peaking and productivity has long-since peaked — the ratio of satisfaction returned on energy invested is spiralling down.

We have reached Peak Java.

Programmers like being productive. They like new and cutting edge technologies. If I had a fiver for every developer I came across who was learning Python or Ruby on Rails in their spare time, I’d have… thirty quid or something.

There’s change coming. People are talking about it more and more. Java will be around for a long time but the next generation of programmers, today’s hackers who will be tomorrows CTOs, haven’t got time nor the inclination to learn ‘the stack’ — they’re far too busy churning out killer web applications in PHP, Python and Rails.

As for me, I’m running to the Welsh mountains to build a hut and learn to subsist on a diet of grass and rainwater before the oil runs out.

• * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html