Simson Garfinkel, please give up. He posted a follow-on article to go over the responses to his previous anti-Java screed. Naturally, he paints all Java supporters as fanatics, and reprints more anecdotes about Java being bad, bad, bad. Unfortunately, he makes his opponents’ point for them with this simple quote: “There are tens of thousands of companies using Java and hundreds providing tools for the language.” Surely not all of those people are failing with Java. Clearly Java has plenty of problems, but dismissing it as an utter failure is as ridiculous as touting it as the solution to every programming problem. The bottom line with Java is that it’s a lot more accessible than C or C++, platform independent (especially in server applications), and yet much more structured and maintainable than most scripting languages. It’s not perfect, and I still use Perl for most of my personal programming, but Java clearly has a place in the world.