There's not much technical discussion to be had when our views of practicality are so different, and practicality itself so subjective and context-dependent. If

There's not much technical discussion to be had when our views of practicality are so different, and practicality itself so subjective and context-dependent. If Java starts to smell like COBOL across the wider industry (not just HN types) will it no longer be practical, because it no longer satisfies the narrow criteria "has been deployed in critical applications and is not being migrated away from"[0]? What about the great tooling/perf/backwards compatibility/ecosystem mentioned, do those not matter at all for practicality concerns? I'm not sure. Maybe we'll just agree that practicality is a low bar to satisfy and shouldn't be a high concern for much? Reminds me of the discussions around WorseIsBetter, and a quote from Wayne Mack[1]. [0] I've heard from COBOL forums that the amount of new COBOL written each day and existing in the world keeps increasing; they've even got Object-Oriented COBOL now. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if COBOL had the same market pressures Java does (plus university pressure) and if the world was basically stuck with it in the same way we've had Java this century that we wouldn't be able to push it to service our needs. [1] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign http://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign "I believe it is time to explicitly state the long held secret of software, we do not need to do design; design is ineffective and costly."