The last months have been extremely busy. Three different projects causing lots of work and sometimes worries, three different conferences I attended as a speaker and various talks at the local JUG. This made it hard to actually think about what I want to do next year. Now all the busy stuff is over (although somebody mentioned some kind of holiday coming up). So I made up my mind, what I want to do in the next year:

• I want to as much Scala development as possible. I really like that language and it offers tons of inspirations while still allowing me to build on my Java experience.
• I want to learn a little Clojure. Just because I like making knots in my brain.
• I will do some web development. My skills in that area are a little rusty and I don't need much of them in my current main project, but I sure don't want to do Swing development for ever.
• And of course I will continue to read as much as possible about a wide range of topics.

I'm doing this because I actually think it is time to say good bye to Java. The development of Java stagnated in the past and I don't see any sign that its new owner is going to change that. So I need an alternative. For me that's Scala.

On the other hand I'm kind of confident, that the JVM will survive for quite some time in a state that makes it a strong, interesting platform.

Of course I'm no prophet. Maybe Google buys Java and within two years it is the coolest language on the planet ... if so, some Scala experience won't hurt, because a cool Java will certainly contain lots of features from Scala.

Maybe Scala dies or something bad happens to the JVM. In that case  the broad range of programming concepts will make it easy to switch to any language of interest. So I'm feeling confident that my future as a software developer stays safe and interesting.

If I'd stayed with Java as my main language I still would feel safe ... but I'd be not so sure about the 'interesting' part.