I confess: I could never really quite "get" Java. I always felt like it was pushed down everybody's throat by Sun on a wave of everybody's obsession with hating Microsoft. <i>Write once, run everywhere!</i> actually always meant <i>run NOT on Windows</i>. At my school they switched from Pascal to Java in less than 2 years after it came out. <p>But putting all this religious crap aside, and ignoring libraries for a second, I could never quite see the appeal of coding in a language of expressive power just little higher than C++ yet so severely crippled comparing to the latter. Java and Visual Basic invited ex-taxi drivers into the industry, making interviewing process very exhausting and time consuming activity. And, most importantly, Java programmers have always seemed... well... unhappy with their jobs to me. Perhaps due to Java's dominance in "boring" sector of "Enterprise wonders". ("Office Space" comes to mind)<p>And, by the way, when was the last time you saw "Loading C++" message on your cell phone? :-)<p>I guess I shouldn't have said this. I successfully managed to dodge Java ever since I graduated and that makes me a non-insider :)