The Middle

There's been a great deal of commotion lately regarding Java and its merits, collected and documented neatly by J$ here.

As someone who works in and around Java all day, I just have to chime in with my two cents.

Java is not cool. Say it with me again, it'll help. Java is not cool.

Java is old. In fact, you could almost call it a mature technology. So much maturity that's it has gained a great deal of ubiquity over the last serveral years. Finally, there are a great deal of companies with large sums of $$ riding on Java. As a direct consequence of this, it has shed itself almost completely of its coolness as a technology.

Maturity. Ubiquity. Money.

Those three E's can completely suck the cool out of anything, to the geeks of the world. I'd go so far as to say that the absence of those three things is what makes a technology cool in the first place.

Redhat? Not cool, try Gentoo.

Movable Type? That's so 2002, use WordPress.

Apache 1.3.x? Who cares about billions of pages served? Bring on 2.0!

CVS? How old is that? Have you never heard of subversion?

I'm as guilty as anyone of subjecting myself to something just because it's cool (I've hit at least 3 of the above examples). The appropriateness of the tool is irrelevant, any geek worth his salt will go for the cool factor, just because he can, or just becuase he's bored to tears by the 'appropriate' solution.

I feel like this is what Graham was getting at in his essay. Any code monkey can learn Java and become proficient with it, but the real hackers don't stop there, collecting paychecks and coding 10-4 every day.

Java is a solved problem. The people who are looking for the next problem on the list are the exciting ones to hire.