Cedric Beust: Rick Hightower posted an interesting follow-up to Zed's rant against Ruby on Rails. There are a lot of insightful comments in this discussion, and one in particular caught my attention:
People are tired of dealing with Java's many idiosyncrasies
I've been reading this a lot these past years but I've yet to see any evidence of it.
Come to think of it, this statement is mostly coming from bloggers, but...
They don't speak for all Java developers (actually, they represent a very tiny fraction of them).
They need to drive traffic to their blog, and nothing achieves this goal better than posts titled "Java is dying" or "Ruby has won".
I've been programming in Java for more than ten years. I have studied a lot of languages, and I keep learning new ones just out of curiosity. I even use some of these exotic languages here and there as the need warrants. Yes, some of these feel really good to program in (Ruby and Groovy for example), but at the end of the day, I still like Java. A lot.
Being a heavy blogger myself, I agree with Cedric's assessment that we tend to go with the provocative topics. People just wouldn't read anything else.
It is also true that bloggers are not representative of the wider Java programming community. This is similar to the situation with radio commercials. I once heard it on the radio that if a blind Martian arrives on Earth and landed in the United States, by listening to the radio ads alone, he would conclude that it is a country where everyone eats at McDonald's.
But mostly, I want to echo Cedric's sentiment:
> but at the end of the day, I still like Java. A lot. Me too!
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