# Why are you not using [the language of the year] instead of Java?

Over the years, I get asked frequently: "Why are you not using [the language of the year] instead of Java?"
    At my very
    first serverside project, I had to justify myself for using Java instead of Perl. In the early Java years, I got
    frequent questions about whether we should switch to Python, later Jython.


    I collected the languages for the question Why are you not using (...) instead of Java? in chronological order:



    Perl (~1994)
    python (~1995)
    jython (~1997)
    Groovy (~2004)
    Scala (~2004+)
    Ruby on Rails / jRuby (~2006)
    CoffeeScript (~2010)
    Ceylon (~2011)
    Clojure (~2012)
    Dart (~2013)
    TypeScript (~2014+)
    Kotlin (2017+)


Because of the high project workload, I never managed to learn anything else than Java and JavaScript. Therefore we
never had to migrate to anything else.
However, if I had to pick one language from the list above, I guess Python would be the most useful one to know.


    I'm already curious about the next programming language of the year 2021+.


    Maybe it is going to be the compact and expressive COW-language (2006 blog post)?