A while back I found myself standing in line behind a git in a supermarket queue who was talking to his friend about their comp sci course. He spoke smugly of how he wasn’t going to learn C++ because everyone would be switching to Java within a few years anyway. What a frikkin idiot.
… to ignore Java! If this alleged internal Sun memo [thanks SlashDot ] is genuine, then it is pretty much an acknowlegement of the fact that Java has been implemented so badly that it’s too bloated and unstable to be worth using. My favourite bit is the revelation that "Hello World" [the classic minimal executable] requires 9 MB to run [on Solaris]. Suddenly Microsoft doesn’t seem quite so evil for trying to exclude Sun’s Java Runtime Engine in WindowsXP…
Of course, there’s a very good chance that the memo is a fake, but since it’s so well written, and I’m fired up anyway, let me just say that I’ve always had a dislike for Java, because despite wild claims about how fantastically great it was, all I ever saw of it were ugly, buggy applets that anyone with half a brain writes in Flash these days.