I attended my first JAVAWUG meeting on June 9th for a talk on concurrency and performance.  I am very new to the development scene but it appeared to me that Kirk Pepperdine was in fact arguing that the way forward is to use progamming languages that are more medium level in behaviour rather than higher level.

One of the key benefits that Java has over a lot of languages is that it is platform independant, a higher level programming language that is very portable.

We are in a climate where technological advances in CPU are more about doubling up cores rather than increasing clock speed – this means that to produce performance gains and efficiency, code should be adapted to the hardware upon which it will be run.

Generally software is designed with a certain hardware architecture that is assumed.  Now that this architecture has changed the assumptions are now incorrect and programs might have to be re-engineered in order to run correctly and escape potential bottlenecks in their operation.

All in all I felt the presentation was showing that languages would have to be more hardware aware when writing programs.  This for me kinda removed the gloss of using Java.