Java 8: why should you care? - Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-Style Programming - page 6

ability of early browsers to (safely) execute Java code applets gave it a niche in universities,
whose graduates then populated industry. There was initial resistance to the additional run cost
of Java over C/C++, but machines got faster and programmer time became more and more
important. Microsoft's C# further validated the Java-style object-oriented model.
But the climate is changing for the programming language ecosystem; programmers are
increasingly dealing with so-called big data (datasets of terabytes and up) and wishing to exploit
multicore computers or computing clusters effectively to process it. And this means using
parallel processing—something Java wasn't previously friendly to.
You may have come across programming ideas from other programming niches (for example,
Google's map-reduce or the relative ease of data manipulation using database query languages
such as SQL) that help you work with large volumes of data and multicore CPUs. Figure 1.1
summarizes the language ecosystem pictorially: think of the landscape as the space of
programming problems and the dominant vegetation for a particular bit of ground as the
favorite language for that program. Climate change is the idea that new hardware or new
programming influences (for example, “Why can't I program in SQL-like style?”) mean that
different languages become the language of choice for new projects, just like increasing regional
temperatures mean grapes now thrive in higher latitudes. But of course there's
hysteresis—many an old farmer will keep raising traditional crops. In summary, new languages
are appearing and becoming increasingly popular because they've adapted quickly to the climate
change.