This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026.
https://gotopia.tech

Ben Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more Books

Read the full transcription of this interview here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/439

RESOURCES
Ben
https://mastodon.social/@kittylyst
https://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.social
https://github.com/kittylyst
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylyst
https://www.kittylyst.com

Links
https://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystem
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25
https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitation
https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968
https://openjdk.org/jeps/353
https://openjdk.org/jeps/416
https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffm
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO State of the Art, Java Champion & Red Hat Senior Principal SW Engineer Ben Evans delivers a sweeping, data-driven audit of Java's health in 2026 — and the picture is far healthier than the tech press would have you believe. Server-side Java workloads have roughly doubled in the last 7 years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top 4 programming languages for 12 consecutive years, and the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack — Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak — runs on it. The real insight is mathematical: explosive growth of a small language base is still dwarfed by modest growth of Java's enormous installed base. Java isn't dying; it's just not shiny enough to get clicks.

The meat of the talk is a masterclass in Java's architecture and roadmap. Ben unpacks the fundamental tension between dynamism (the JVM's Lisp-and-Smalltalk-heritage runtime) and integrity (modern security demands that restrict unchecked internal API access), before walking through the near and far future: Project Valhalla's value types (the most fundamental change to Java ever — bigger than generics or lambdas), the Vector API waiting on Valhalla to land, nullability markers, ahead-of-time compilation, and beyond that, type classes and Project Babylon.

His honest take on AI tooling is sharp: great for greenfield, genuinely poor at architectural reasoning and version-specific code, and only a real productivity multiplier for teams who already have solid engineering practices. Oh, and it's a wolf in sheep's clothing — the JVM's dynamism makes it way closer to Lisp than to C++, and Java's philosophy of "boring done right" turns out to be an excellent foundation for AI-era enterprise software.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9
Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA

Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans

GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans