Well, Smalltalk was born in the 60s and has features that Java is still dreaming of… I don’t say it’s a better language, there’s no better languages cos each of them is used for different stuff, the discussion about which is the best language only has a valid argument involving the usage of your fists and other convincing instruments.

But if you want object orientation and easy interfaces… I think Smalltalk takes the whole pie :)

Peace
-stephan

@Thomas: Zen finds absolute truths amusing.

I agree to the first three point to 100%!

I’m not sure if point five is a critical one.

And to point four: as it’s often said here in germany: ‘Wer ist Paul’? ;o)

Greetings

Mario

I have been using PicoContainer and Spring without any XML. I use Gant and Guice, both without XML. JPA is usable without XML and my current favorite is Grails - without XML. When doing Java web stuff next time I’m going to use Seam - without XML.

“Java is just another language that currently fills a role in some web-based situations.”

Did I say anything else?

Peace
-stephan

“What version of Java did you start with? Probably 1.1.”

I used 1.0, from the beginning. Applets were a pain and I was sure they didn’t take of. Some people wrote their own CGI interface for Java - noone talks about them anymore. So we started big time Java development with the first servlet container (jigsaw?). The JDK even with 1.1 (1.0) was so much better than other solutions for other languages. The JDK just felt bug free and complete. What did really impress me though back then was WebObjects from NeXT. An eye opener and the grand father of all frameworks which came after.

“With a bit of Java arrogance and shortsightedness, you also assume that server side web apps in the enterprise will always be browser based and always have the same hardware and networking requirements. [...] That the web will continue to work as it has for the past ten years.”

While I wrote: “Either the industry changes disruptly and a new language will rise with the change or Java - the plattform and the language - will absorb (as was proven by the ecosphere) the best ideas and adopt.”

Perhaps it’s best you do the diff yourself and see that your comment is a strawman argument. I didn’t say that.

“With a bit of Java arrogance and shortsightedness, …”

I’ve been programming for 25 years now, in more than 30 languages, I feel I’m prepared to change and after 25 years I don’t show much shortsightedness anymore.

“Ruby on Rails” is still irrelavant and the hype cycle seems to ebb off. Not a winner. I did a lot of Ruby in the 90s and did some Rails projects. Nice stuff but in the end it has too many problems. Some companies I know people responsible for choosing the technology for development have problems with scaling Rails and maintaining the code. We’ll see how that plays out.

And it’s probably Grails - running on the VM and the Java plattform - which gains massive momentum. Where ever I look there are Grails projects starting. I’ve started my own ;-)

Peace
-stephan

Java succeeded for these reasons:

1. There’s only one way to do it in Java. There isn’t a lot of flourish or syntactic sugar.
2. Because it’s so straightforward, companies like it because it makes engineers “pluggable” .
3. It had a big company with a huge marketing machine behind it (which companies also liked).
4. XML.

I use Java. It’s a decent language. It’s great in a corporate environment because its syntax is so straightforward and simple that everyone does it pretty much the same way. Java programmers can be swapped out with relative ease on a project. These days, Idea and Eclipse can do 80% of your coding for you, and XML specifications for J2EE, Spring, and Hibernate are pretty restrictive–how creative can you really be?

And would any of us be using Java if it hadn’t been for Sun? You probably would have never heard of it. What version of Java did you start with? Probably 1.1. If it’s so great, why start so late. 1.0 was out for quite a while. I tried it. Applets sucked, wasn’t good for anything else, so I stuck with Perl and FastCGI. But that big booth at InternetWorld in LA, and Corel rewriting WordPerfect as an applet? Very impressive, and I was young and impressionable.

But I think the most significant reason for Java’s success, and the primary indicator that Java is far from a perfect language is XML. If you took XML away from Java, you’d be doing a lot more work to get applications out the door. Other languages use XML for configuration files and documents, but XML in Javaland has to be more. It becomes a means to write domain specific languages around your business cases, to simplify the tedious in Java. “Languages” like Ant, Spring, J2EE are all required to get your web app working. You have to use XML to build these little languages to augment what’s missing in Java. Probably 60-80% of any Java web application these days is the XML glue that is holding it together: web.xml, spring.xml, ejb.xml, build.xml, project.xml, hibernate.xml, etc.

With a bit of Java arrogance and shortsightedness, you also assume that server side web apps in the enterprise will always be browser based and always have the same hardware and networking requirements. That the web will continue to work as it has for the past ten years. Sure Java will be around for a long time, just like COBOL is still around. But that doesn’t mean that new languages and tools won’t rise up to fill voids in the server-side the same way Java did. .NET and Ruby on Rails seem to be taking a nice chunk out of Java’s armor these days. I know lots of enterprises using these tools rather than pure Java.

Java is just another language that currently fills a role in some web-based situations.