If Java Wasn't Cool 10 Years Ago, What About Now? 511
10 years ago today on this site, readers answered the question "Why is Java considered un-cool?" 10 years later, Java might not be hip, but it's certainly stuck around. (For slightly more than 10 years, it's been the basis of the Advanced Placement test for computer science, too, which means that lots of American students are exposed to Java as their first formally taught language.) And for most of that time, it's been (almost entirely) Free, open source software, despite some grumbling from Oracle. How do you see Java in 2014? Are the pessimists right?
Re: Nope (Score:5, Funny)
COBOL was never cool, either, but is still in use in enterprises.
For learning the craft, they should use what's best to teach it, not necessarily what's relevant at the time (unless it's a job school).
Lawyers aren't cool, and they make almost as much money as COBOL programmers. They even have their own schools.
Everybody should learn COBOL though. "Okay class, now we're going to learn what it is like when you only have pass-by-value, and no references. At the end of the unit we will understand why all modern languages use pass-by-reference, except for optimizing literals, and why modern COBOL programmers write all their new code in C libraries."
Java & C# (Score:4, Funny)
Java combines the wonderfull readability of C++ with the blazing speed of smalltalk. C# is an innovative language from Microsoft that takes those two features of Java and adds in the portability of Visual Basic.