Who is gonna be the next Java?

After java went out in 1995, it was difficult to think it would have reached such a widespread adoption.

There were several others OO programming languages around (C++ went out in 1983), but key to the success of java were a few language enhancements, the focus on enterprise (i.e. web) development and a strong marketing and commercial strategy.

Now many claims Java is old and stale.
So who's gonna take its place ?

Omitting commercial reasoning, we have a plethora of potential alternatives: ruby, jruby, groovy, scala....

We can see that none of them impose a big shift in programming paradigm: they basically combine object orientation with funcional pardigm.

But scala is the only one to be at the same time:

• statically typed: checks type at compiler time, but avoids redundant typing through a local type inference mechanism
  
• fully java compatible: it can smoothly run on a jvm, leveraging existing libraries and code base
• java targeted: Martin Odersky created scala with the intent of making a better java, so it looks more natural to java programmer than other languages
  

So at the time my bet would be on scala...