Fredrik Lundh wrote: > Ben Sizer wrote: > > > Java itself never deserved to be the 'next' anything anyway. > > I've had a lot of developers come up to me and > say, "I haven't had this much fun in a long time. > It sure beats writing Cobol" -- James Gosling
Nice quote! It also reinforces the impression that there are many people working with technology who don't have very much control over the tools they get to use - you could replace Cobol with VB in the quote and it'd still echo the sentiments of a large number of developers. Of course, it's just not accurate to imply that Java had nothing to offer: in an age when a number of languages provided support for safe execution (Obliq, Telescript, Safe-Tcl, etc.) and where a few had in-built support for concurrency (Ada, Occam, etc.), Java rather effectively brought both of these and more to the mainstream. It may be true that the language didn't justify the hype and that the API was fairly badly designed in various places, but it represented a step up for most developers, and the hype managed to give many of those developers a chance or an excuse to use the language, rather than be forbidden to use it because it didn't fit in with corporate or organisational strategy. There are parallels with Rails in the Java hype story: something better than what lots of people are using (probably PHP in most cases), combined with a dose of hype to persuade decision makers that everyone else in the herd is moving in that direction, leads to something suddenly becoming popular, being perceived as the next big thing, and having lots of vocal evangelists who might seem like wise men to the masses, but whose pronouncements on dynamic languages, for example, seem belated and obvious to many of us. For those inclined to panic at such a spectacle, a perusal of the comp.lang.python/python-list archives for 1996-1998 might be informative to see how a community can adapt sensibly to such events. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list