As of Ruby, Erlang, and other languages, it seems that people always discover a new cool language that is killing Java, each time more dynamic than the other. First it was Python, now the same people are talking about Ruby, next time Erlang… What is good about java is the fact that: * it is more a platform than a language !! For example, if you want to use Python on the Java platform, or Ruby, or javascript you can, and it’s working great. * you have tons of open-sourced APIs that you can use, much more than in these new cool languages. * it’s really easy to build reusable code in java, despite some people are saying. OK, the main java language is strongly typed, but I personally think that this is necessary for everything else than small projects * Azureus is not using Swing, and I always found that the IBM SWT was not the good approach to Java graphics. It had success mainly because Awt was very limited, and Swing performance was poor at the beginning, which is not the case anymore, and since a long time now ;-)

A few weeks ago Phil Toland wrote Stop the Insanity about the “rise” in popularity of languages other than Java. (but it didn’t pop up in my feed reader until today) Last year it seemed you couldn’t turn around without……