[ajross]

Even on the "evolutionary" web, I don't think anyone in 2007 would have predicted the rise (and now... fall?) of MVC frameworks or the explosion of jQuery, both of which existed and were relatively popular at the time. Likewise the NoSQL rebellion was a surprise. Five years from now, we'll all be using WebGL-based dyanmic UIs. Or will we?

I think the point is more that 5+ year planning in the tech industry is simply pointless, not that all technologies will be replaced. Sure, there are some constants. We can all safely predict that in five years we'll still be writing drivers and middleware in C, still be using zlib and libjpeg, etc...

[_ea1k]

Yes, it is extremely difficult to predict which technologies will win over a 5-10 year period vs their competitors. Eg, predicting that jQuery would appear vs the evolution of some other system (ExtJS?).

On the other hand, predicting what changes will occur to a legacy enterprise system tend to be much easier.

In the overall scope of things, Java hasn't really changed that much over the past five years. I think that some long-range planning of the kinds of changes they are thinking about actually makes sense. The need for closures, reified generic types, and an improved type system is unlikely to change in the next 5-10 years.