The Failed Promise
My dislike for C++ is well-known by those who know me. As is my lack of fondness for Perl. I have a new one though. Java. Oracle and Apple have conspired to kill it. (I should say this much -- its been a long time, about a decade, since I developed any Java code. Its entirely possible that I remember the language with more fondness than it truly warrants. C++ was once beautiful too -- before ANSI went and mutated it beyond all hope back in 1990 or thereabouts.) Which is a shame, because Java started with such promise. Write-once, run-anywhere. Strongly typed, and a paradigm for OO that was so far superior to C++. (Multiple inheritance is the bane of semi-competent C++ engineers, who often can't even properly cope with pointers to memory.) For years, I bemoaned the fact that the single biggest weakness of Java was the fact that it was seen as a way to make more dynamic web pages. (I remember HotJava -- what a revolutionary thing it was indeed.) But even sta