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The Struggle To Keep Java Relevant
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions Oracle's ability to revive interest in Java in the wake of Oracle VP Jeet Kaul's announcement at EclipseCon that he would 'like to see people with piercings doing Java programming.' 'If Kaul is hoping Java will once again attract youthful, cutting-edge developers, as it did when it debuted in 1995, [Kaul] may be in for a long wait,' McAllister writes. 'Java has evolved from a groundbreaking, revolutionary language platform to something closer to a modern-day version of Cobol.' And, as McAllister sees it, 'Nothing screams "get off my lawn" like a language controlled by Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software vendor. The chances that Java can attract the mohawks-and-tattoos set today seem slimmer than ever.'"
.NET beat you years ago. Sorry.
--- Signed: The pierced and tattooed crowd.
Java doesn't dominate anything, Java mumbles under its breath that that is its stapler and it's going to burn everything down.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Java was never "groundbreaking, revolutionary". It was a failed bytecode-based language for set top boxes that was adopted by developers in 1995 because they were scared: non-Microsoft platforms had almost no GUI toolkits and almost no reasonable programming language other than C. People knew that the language sucked, that AWT sucked, and that applets didn't work, but they foolishly believed Sun when Sun promised that they would fix all that. Sun also promised at the time that Java would become an ISO standard and that they would release an open source implementation soon (all lies as it turned out). And applets looked like a potentially good way of challenging Windows and Microsoft, going around Microsoft's established distribution channels.
People who bet on Java applets wanted the right idea; we see that now with Flash and AJAX.
But betting on Sun was the wrong move: Sun screwed up the language, screwed up the toolkits, screwed up the implementations, and made Java one of the most proprietary languages in existence.
In the end, all Sun managed to produce was the only thing they have ever been able to produce: bloated server side software.
Good riddance, Sun, you won't be missed.
OK, that's it, I'm dropping Slashdot. If this is the level of +5 articles then I'm fuckin' off.
I hope you're paid by the hour.