My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry.
The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money.
For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not horribly slow.
If 1/100th of the VC money going into social startups would go into actual technology companies, if it were an accpeted business model to sell (maybe read-only open source) technology for money, then the tech landscape would be totally different.
TL;DR: to replace Java, a lot of directed professional development effort would be needed: money would help a lot.
If 1/100th of the VC money going into social startups would go into actual technology companies, if it were an accpeted business model to sell (maybe read-only open source) technology for money, then the tech landscape would be totally different.
TL;DR: to replace Java, a lot of directed professional development effort would be needed: money would help a lot.