Java ranked third in January 2026's TIOBE Index at 8.71%, behind Python and C. That's down 1.44% year-over-year, but here's what the decline narrative misses: nine million developers worldwide still write Java, with 39,500 US job openings paying a median $116K.
The enterprise math is straightforward. When Netflix migrated thousands of services from JDK 8 to JDK 17, they cut garbage collection CPU time by 20%. Generational ZGC delivers near-zero pause times for systems processing petabytes. That's not legacy preservation, that's active optimization at scale.
AWS added Java 25 support to Lambda in late 2025. Amazon Q Developer now assists with Java 21 upgrades. Major cloud providers don't invest in tooling for dying languages.
The six-month release cycle since JDK 9 brought virtual threads (Project Loom), value types (Project Valhalla), and quality-of-life improvements (Project Amber). Records, sealed classes, pattern matching: these aren't cosmetic. They're fundamental changes making Java competitive with newer languages while maintaining 30 years of backward compatibility.
The data infrastructure tells its own story. Hadoop market projections hit $196.53 billion in 2025. Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Kafka: all Java. Apache Spark processes petabytes daily on the JVM.
Yes, 90% of Android developers now prefer Kotlin for new development. But Java remains fully supported and essential for existing codebases. The compatibility choice exists because enterprises demand it.
Python (created 1991) and Java (created 1995) are roughly the same age. One looks newer because syntax is concise. The other looks older because it prioritizes stability. When you're running transaction systems for banks, "move fast and break things" becomes "move carefully and keep the money flowing."
The JEP 0 page shows active enhancement proposals. The language evolves. Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies still run Java backends. These aren't zombie systems, they're deliberately chosen platforms where reliability, performance, and 30 years of tooling maturity matter more than being the trendy choice at meetups.
Java isn't dead. It's just not trying to be cool anymore. And for enterprise workloads, that's exactly the point.