Sun CEO Explicitly Endorsed Java's Use In Android

It would be really funny if I had not seen too much of such "thinking" in my Java days /via @migueldeicaza @crdant

Nice description of Azul's Pauseless Garbage Collector and how it overcomes issues faced by low-pause GCs (via @ijuma)

"Businesses HATE to hear “convert” and “rewrite”. My boss is about ready to fire anyone on the spot to suggests that these days, and he’s not alone.

You can’t have it both ways. The process of accreting ever more cruft on top of a soggy, muddy foundation of stuff is exactly what COBOL shops do. They were doing it the 1970’s when I started, and they’re still doing it. True fact: it was a large American insurance company CIO who blocked changes to COBOL ‘74 because it would impact some ‘68 code. It is this approach which makes java the new COBOL. I worked in that industry for the last eight years (no longer, phew), and there are insurance companies that refuse to upgrade from jdk 1.3. The American financial services industry (which is being exposed a tad these days) runs on 30 to 40 year old COBOL codebases; they don’t see the need to rewrite or convert to anything better. They are applying the same “thinking” process to their java code. The language is COBOL."

"I also agree that Java is in a poor state for all the reasons above. In fact, I believe that if Eclipse hadn’t come out, Java would be starting to collapse around now. Eclipse makes you pretty darned productive, and more, it allows people who are basically semi-programmers to generate useful work by using command completion to glue together predefined boxes. But it’s so verbose. Reading the code is quite slow because your brain runs out of “fast RAM” and you lose your mental representation about the first screen in a file when you’re reading the fifth one."

This is why device-independent UIs are a necessity. Especially similar devices of the same vendor.
Also, another person who thinks Java is far from great.