Will Java Trend Towards Obscurity?

True, but I almost never had to just "cast and hope" with clojure calling java code. When it comes to "serious" java (read: "enterprise class" with as much derision as possible) reflection tends to become involved and Kotlin's type system is quite a bit more conservative.

I agree about the awkwardness of

(let [b (SomeBean. )]
  (.setA b a-value)
  (.setB b b-value)
  b)

I tended to hide those away under the rug.

Interesting thought... A few more factors that might play a role:

• Android documentation and tutorials have vastly improved over the past few years
• Stackoverflow is heavily policed. Duplicates are usually closed. Poor questions deleted. I wonder if these are also taken into account in "Stack Overflow Trends"
• Some questions don't have tags. It's rare, but a search for "android -[android]" (the word android minus the tag android) comes up with 100K results

So yeah, I guess it makes sense that we have reached something like "Q&A saturation" for Android.

I was also wondering something else along the lines... The graph's Y-axis unit is the percentage of all questions asked per month, and not an absolute amount of questions. I assume the amount of questions asked per month changes over time.

Assuming the active Stackoverflow community was also growing over the past few years, I guess we have overall more questions showing up every month compared to a few years ago where Java and Android were in its prime.

Maybe the actual amount of Java questions per month didn't go down, just the relative amount compared to all questions asked on the platform?

We do have more technologies in the mix that play a bigger role in recent years.

But on the other hand... I'm not a data scientist or analyst. I have no idea what all of that means :-D

I think there might be two reasons for the rise in web development questions on Stackoverflow:

First of all - and that's only from my own experience and limited POV - I believe there is growing demand for web development and the initial "mobile app gold rush" may have died down quite a bit.

It is definitely more difficult and pretty costly to reach a wide audience using mobile apps alone. I believe most people are reluctant to install yet another app. They prefer to have just a handful important ones on their phone. Also mobile app users are notoriously cheap. They even feel ripped off when charged a single Dollar for something that is probably worth at least $10.

Hidden rant incoming :-D

When I tried to sell Android mobile apps about 6 or 7 years ago it basically cost me around $1 for a single user acquisition for a free app (via ads, promo campaigns etc.). I guess it would have been easily $5 to $10 per new user for a $1 paid app. Since the market is much more over-saturated now, I guess those acquisition costs went up by quite a bit.

Profit can be only expected once the app makes it into the top 10, or gets promoted and featured by Google or Apple, and even then it's no guarantee.

A game of mine was featured and promoted by the Samsung app store. It was offered for free around the world for a whole week. It didn't make a difference and never turned into a profit. I didn't gain any extra users beyond the ones who got the game for free.

That model doesn't make much sense for most smaller companies with small (or no) marketing budget, especially if the app is free and just ad-driven. It was a losing game. Only the biggest app developers and publishers can reliably turn that into a profit with a big marketing budget and inside connections.

I think for most businesses it probably makes more sense to have primarily a website instead of an app. That also saves them all the complications that come with maintaining and publishing mobile apps:

• 30% app store sales cut
• customers expect apps to be for free or at least extremely cheap
• lengthy, sometimes problematic review process
• costly user acquisition
• no direct way to influence store listing as promoted content (unless you have friends at Google or Apple)

end of rant :-D

It is also relatively easy to make a website appear and behave like a mobile app with a bit of CSS magic. That's probably another reason to focus on web first and have a native app as an after thought if really necessary.

But again, I didn't check if there is really a mobile down / web up trend world wide. And my whole rant here is for nothing and I'm probably totally wrong about it.

But here's the other aspect that probably has a stronger impact on web dev questions going up on SO: Vue.JS and even more so ReactJS introduced a bit of a paradigm shift in the ways we think about solving web development problems. It's a shift from imperative to declarative style, which is great in my opinion. But that also raises a lot of questions that need answers.

And then there's the tendency in web development, especially in the frontend development world, to reinvent itself repeatedly. New standards, new tool chains, frameworks and libraries are introduced all the time. Some existing ones change beyond recognition from one major version to the next. That's something I'm not used to in the more slow-paced Java development world where APIs seem to be much more stable (perhaps more thought was put into them ahead of time?).

I'm currently following the react-js tag on StackOverflow and noticed that developers run into the same kinds of problems due to the "latest" shift from component classes to function components with hooks. Function names such as useEffect and their arguments are not really self-explaining or a great example of a well designed API.

It's necessary to either read (and understand) the documentation or stumble into issues and ask for help. We're probably not running out of questions until the tech matures enough so it settles and the only thing we need to focus on is solving business needs and not battle and tame our tools.

So, I guess to sum it up, I see two things causing the rise:

1. Maybe there's more demand for web development?
2. Modern web development technology is constantly changing, creating new problems that need answers