jottinger

Trump can STFU here. Mein Gott, what an arrogant jackass. It is what people call it. If people refer to it as AI, then AI it is. If people refer to it as turtle soup, turtle soup it is. If HE calls it super intelligence, that says more about how little intelligence he has than anything else. Yeesh.

Well, my real name is Joseph Ottinger. I've been writing about "the enterprise" and Java since around 2000, as editor for TheServerSide.com, Java Developer Journal, and writing multiple books on Java, as well as writing Java code for a lot of people for, well, decades. Java's doing all right. Java's "immortality" is still in question; it might be the next COBOL, but I don't pretend to know the future and I can see a world in which something eats Java's lunch TOMORROW, although I don't know what that something is yet.

Totally fair, totally understood, such is life, which is why the very first paragraph says what the whole article then articulates in more detail. :D

I do this weird "tell people stuff up front" thing where I don't like clickbait titles, don't prefer the simple thing to the true thing, use opening paragraphs as actual theses - or close to it. If you read the first paragraph, you got the gist. The footnotes are footnotes because having interspersed aside text isn't convenient to write.

It's not flamebait - or "flamebate" - and I don't write "for favorable feedback." Did you not read the article? The author - me - actually means every word of it, including the bits about vocation and joy. Life is not single-dimensional, and neither is knowledge.

I code for fun and income. I don't stay at engagements where I can't invest personally in what I'm doing, and I don't hire people who don't enjoy what they're doing as they're doing it. Anything else feels punitive for everyone involved.

All of them are respectable. I've done most of those - Icon's new for me, and I don't think I've ever written anything in Ada either although I've come unfortunately close thanks to industrial requirements. I escaped!

And yes, awk is a programming language. And respectable. I tend not to use it much any more, but that's because there are other things that feel easier than remembering the syntax. C'est la vie.

Yeah, and I despise it. :D I purposefully expose the lede in my own articles early and often and as up front as I can make it - the editorial reviews keep saying "you should optimize for the clix, maing!" and ... no. If someone doesn't want to read the crap I come up with, I want them to know they don't want to read it right out of the gate, personally.

Totally fair, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I left a lot of languages out in my consideration even when they're on my CV. Heck, I work in Java in my day job - I'm taking time away from it to write this comment - and realized after I'd finished my third draft that I didn't mention it at all. And I DO Clojure, have done Ruby, have done Scala (and will never do so again if I have any choice in the matter).

I could have gone into each language as a sort of postmortem - even for the ones that aren't dead right now - but for every one of them there'd be a host of people saying "wait, you're wrong" and they'd be right, and maybe I would be in that host saying I was wrong at the same time. (Again, see the footnotes: it's right there!)

But the piece isn't abotu a postmortem analysis of whether a language is fun or not - what I enjoy isn't going to be what you enjoy, nor should it be, and I don't care what you use, as long as you use it well and for the benefit of mankind.

Mine, either.

Indeed! That's how it works, pretty much every time, unless language choice is dictated from above, which ALSO happens.

(And is why I know COBOL today, although I'm probably stronger on COBOL-77 than COBOL-85, when I STARTED COBOL after COBOL-85 was a thing.)