[ale] OT: So what about Java?

[Jeff Hubbs]

I'm combing through dozens and dozens of job postings as per usual and I
see an awful lot of jobs that require Java knowledge as well as J2EE,
JavaScript, servlets, etc.

Is there anything about this Java mini-universe that simply cannot be
accomplished through other means that are not tightly tied to one
company or any company at all?

I am old-school enough that I distrust languages that are not created
independently from any corporate interest.  I guess I had a bit of an
"ah-ha moment" WAAAAY back when I was first studying Pascal in the 1980s
- that a programming language can be committed to international
standardization  with all platform-specific implementations being
subservient to those standards, to the point that implementers would run
serious political and market-share risks if they "broke" their
implementation of a given language.

Even when I was in high school, I recall that there were some definite
non-standardization among implementations of BASIC such that if you were
used to coding on Data General (as I did) and found yourself writing
code on another machine (as I did when participating in regional
programming contests), you needed to know to use parens instead of
brackets for array index values or whatever.  

My opinion is that there is a deep dark danger associated with Java, C#,
or .NET implementations such that a sharper cookie should look
elsewhere.  I, personally, am far more interested in the likes of Lython
or Perl.  Am I off-base about all this?

- Jeff

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