"The checks in the mail", "I'll respect you in the morning"...alas, I've been betrayed by Java, and don't trust its sweet blandishments any more.

I worked six months on a project for eBay that included a Java applet for communication. Two weeks after we released it, Sun introduced a JRE upgrade (1.5, I think it was). Since they pushed the upgrade through popups and autoupgrade, within a few days complaints started flooding in about how that "piece of crap" we built wouldn't even run. Not our fault, the upgrade to "universal" Java changed how integers were passed across the interface to JavaScript.

Java's just another programming language, no matter how outrageously Sun hypes it. It has strengths and weaknesses, and you can count on somebody inventing a better language some day. Or maybe by now. In many ways, Microsoft's .Net is superior to Java simply because, Microsoft being Microsoft, they weren't first to market and watched and learned from Java's experience. Ironically, and lest that trigger the obligatory squawking about Microsoft's predation, that's how Sun's JSP turned out better than Microsoft's ASP--Sun harvested lessons from Microsoft; and now Microsoft's incorporated lessons from JSP back into ASP.Net. And so it goes.

So I don't get involved in programming language religious wars. The wheel will always turn, and whatever I thought always ends up yesterday's news.

But I will say this, because it's so off the wall that it may be hard to even marshall arguments to refute it: Having used Java, C, C++, C# and a whole lot more, the coolest language today in my opinion is JavaScript. Yeah, the little toy scripting language...the very underappreciated little toy language. It looks like it aspires to be C, and I think that that misimpression channels people into using it like C, which forecloses learning about the more exotic styles of JavaScript.

I could go on for pages about JavaScript (and in fact I just deleted several geekish paragraphs here), but that's a topic more fit for GeekSpeak.