I found this post on Patrick Logan's blog interesting. Patrick quotes Paul Graham asserting that Java, like Cobol - is an evolutionary dead end in terms of language development:

I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language.

I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, "How can you say that Java won't turn out to be a successful language? It's already a successful language." And I admit that it is, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it (particularly individual books on it), or by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job. When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.

This is just a guess. I may be wrong. My point here is not to diss Java, but to raise the issue of evolutionary trees and get people asking, where on the tree is language X? The reason to ask this question isn't just so that our ghosts can say, in a hundred years, I told you so. It's because staying close to the main branches is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will be good to program in now.

At any given time, you're probably happiest on the main branches of an evolutionary tree. Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals, it must have sucked to be one. The Cro-Magnons would have been constantly coming over and beating you up and stealing your food.

The reason I want to know what languages will be like in a hundred years is so that I know what branch of the tree to bet on now.

I think he's right about Java - it's the butt end of the C language family, and - IMHO - goes about as far as you can go in that direction. To me, the emergence of new dynamic languages like Python and Ruby - which owe more to Smalltalk than to Java - shows you where things are going at a grass roots level. Java may be where a lot of the work is, but it does not seem to be where the interesting action is.