Great hackers and Java

A frog’s eye view of the world: What a load of crap is fairly typical of the responses from the JavaBlogs of the world to Paul Graham’s Great Hackers article. (There’s nothing wrong with the Frog’s Eye View post, I just happened to have followed that particular link). I’m sure there are many great programmers who use Java. There are also doubtless a significant percentage of those who would rather be using some other language. Who cares? You have to use the right toolchain for the job, and sometimes that means using Java. If it weren’t for good IDEs Java would be nearly unusable compared to languages like Python, Perl and Ruby. But, decent IDEs exist, making Java a viable choice for many projects. And, the fact that with Java merely mortal programmers can get work done too is a bonus, not a detriment.

I generally ignore language-war aspects of articles that I read and try to look for interesting points.