Scott Leberknight

Aside from the fact that Oracle's Java Problem contains all kinds of factual and other errors (see the comments on the post) this sentence caught my eye in particular when referring to Java being "quite hard to work with" - "Then, as now, you needed to be a highly trained programmer to make heads or tails of the language."

What's the issue here? That Java is hard to work with? Perhaps more specifically, not just Java but perhaps the artificial complexity in developing "Enterprise" applications in Java? Nope. The problem is that this type of thinking epitomizes the attitude that business people and other "professionals" tend to have about software development in general, in that they believe it is or should be easy and that it is always the tools and rogue programmers that are the problem. Thus, with more and better tools, they reason, there won't be a need for skilled developers and the monkey-work of actually programming could be done by, well, monkeys...