Recently-graduated student here, middle-aged and with more than my fair share of life challenges under my belt. I fell in love with coding by accident, after ha

Recently-graduated student here, middle-aged and with more than my fair share of life challenges under my belt. I fell in love with coding by accident, after half a life in the restaurant trenches. But one of the things you can learn in the trenches is the value of patterns, and the value of recognizing patterns. Over the years I've come to trust my instinct for recognizing patterns, hard-won as it was. Java is swamped in an over-proliferation of verbiage. That is the first impression one has of the language in school: that it requires twice as much code to do anything. And that was, as well, my last impression, as they tried to prepare us for our entry into the world of enterprise computing by steeping us in a rolling, boiling stew of jEverything. Too many cutesy names in a programming language just felt WRONG, and I think my instincts have been borne out. Java is a mess to behold and to work in, and I am fantastically glad that I didn't get that first (Java) job I applied for, but instead got the second (ASP.NET) job. Irony abounds, I know, but .NET seems streamlined and elegant compared to Java EE. Turns out, sometimes you actually CAN judge a book by its cover. And by the 1496 pages in that Java textbook, which, hysterically, serves as merely an introduction... I don't know where I'll be in a few years, but I'm fairly certain I'll not be coding in Java.