jjohns

Didn't see any comment, unless you put it on Jonathan's blog.

Very insightful.

I think you missed the point of Jonathan's article as well. It wasn't even about COBOL. The point is that innovation needs to happen all the way around, not just in languages. The industries that still make use of COBOL are stuck in the 50's, and the language is just a small part of that issue.

You kinda have to agree that writing anything in Java isn't exactly... "fast". That said, I don't use Java for "quick answers" -- if I want something that super easy and needed tomorrow, I'll do it in Ruby (especially if I know that it's not going to need to scale massively or get tons a hits and requests).

I'll be honest, though I have my issues with Java, I've been following along with James Gosling as he's transitioned through different projects and I have to agree with one thing that I think really differentiates Java from newer languages--when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast. It doesn't make it easy, but then again, the solution to difficult and large problems wasn't going to be easy to begin with.