I admire and respect Dr. Gosling. But I don't think he's reached the acceptance stage vis a vis Sun's great sickness unto death: Java. As technology, java is an

I admire and respect Dr. Gosling. But I don't think he's reached the acceptance stage vis a vis Sun's great sickness unto death: Java. As technology, java is an adequate synthesis (and advancement) of bracey-block syntax and UCSD-p system platform abstraction. Lots of potential that failed to ever materialize. Sun's aggressive marketing of java as the solution to everyone's problem stagnated the language, starved the company's other engineering efforts, doomed them to the reign of a feckless boy king, and drove them into the arms of a suitor that walks the walk Sun was talking since at least the Javasoft era. Gosling's characterizations of Sun may have applied pre, say, jdk 1.2, but Sun choose to bite the apple, to compete with (and sue) Microsoft, to attack competing technologies, to restrict competitive products--basically to act just like everybody else. The result is a dreadful technology: PL/1 for the 21st century, embedded through every industry, taught in every school; and a zombie Sun persisting in the bowels of a ruthless "devil" they thought to slay. I'm sure Dr. Gosling knows the changes that Sun went through on its long downward spiral better than just about anyone else, but I wonder if he's willing to acknowledge the role that Java qua product played in sealing Sun's fate and the fate of technologists for whom Java is now the default with which they must labor? An apology for Java(tm) would make the elegies a bit more palatable.