I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.
I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
People who were also traders were also men of Sufism, as we see around Java, people who were outwardly trading but were also men of very high spiritual character. Otherwise no trader would be able to convert a person from one religion to another. It was because they were men of spiritual character.
I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.
In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform
If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.
I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.
Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.
If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.
One of the things that Java is good at is giving you this homogeneous view of a reality that's usually very heterogeneous.
C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.
Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives.
Sitting in my favorite coffeehouse with a new notebook and a hot cup of java is my idea of Heaven.
Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover.
Mark Hammond is working in this area, with Windows Scripting Host. It is definitely an area where Python fits almost perfectly. That's quite independent from Java, actually.
From the point of view of the people who are using the platform, one of the most valuable things about Java is the consistency, the interoperability.
I love a mocha latte!
Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C.
After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.
No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.
What's kept Java from being used as widely as possible is there hasn't been an Open Source implementation of it that's gotten really widespread use.
