As a developer of software based on xwiki, I can promise that java is really helpful in terms of navigation and reading. Sure something more compact may gain in reading sometimes but everything I have seen thus far (such as JavaScript or Groovy) has given me a horrible insecurity feel that a zillion things could happen. This feeling I do not have in java code, especially of code written by others. Paul On 6 août 2013, at 22:21, crocket wrote:

I skimmed through that rant against PHP and I feel we are living in a holy world by manipulating Java. The language is frustrating at the beginning and that's intended, it makes a language that keeps us happy for quite a bit. I cannot really feel any of the rants expressed there to be applicable to Java. Especially because of the flexibility of refactoring there's almost always well designed workarounds. I know python since shortly for a little bit and I must say that the non-freedom-to-indent may be something that bothers me considerably. But at the end the big difference is the toolset and library wealth. Both are considerable for Java and are far less for most other languages. I'd claim this wealth stems from the design of the language (certainly for the IDE tools). Paul

Some "popularity" "facts", for what it means : https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming… I think PHP was one of the reasons for me to choose XWiki ;-) Also anyway I felt more at ease in the tomcat/servlet world. The virtual machine was a real relief when targeting multiple platforms. I also don't have much regrets concerning C or C++. Of course it does not mean that there's not something that will replace Java in the future, but I'm more interested in the JVM languages and particularly Groovy, which comes very handy for the java dev wanting to ease and accelerate coding of some tools/scripts. For a whole production application I'm still uncertain. My lazyness always made me avoid Perl or Python, though I now they are considered quite good. Funny to see that Java is now considered too verbose, considering it was almost considered an advantage when it came after C or C++ - and others (and their "compacting" possibilities that could lead to almost unreadable code) :) For some things it's right that it can become verbose and cumbersome (but sometimes it's driven by what it manipulates, emails parsing or XML are not in rest in terms of complexity ...), but it's less and less true with adding of more and more nicely designed libraries dealing with most topics. Ecosystem counts as much as (or even much than) the language itself now I would say. 2013/8/7 Paul Libbrecht <paul(a)hoplahup.net>