Backup, servers, and bandwidth are *cheap* compared to manpower. I take it you don't work in the software industry. It's almost always much cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem than it is to redesign an application to increase performance.

Time is money after all.

Indistinguishable? Really?

I have yet to meet a non-graduate with who I can discuss a performance problem in terms of time and space complexity. Big O notation? What's that? Some kind of cheerio?

That's not to say that there aren't some very intelligent people without University degrees and some very stupid people with them. I've just found that most people with a passion for their profession are those with degrees. They did have the drive to spend 4 extra years of their lives going to school after all.

You should consider giving it another shot. NetBeans, in my opinion, is by far the best free Java IDE out there right now. As everyone has already pointed out, Eclipse is a plugin nightmare. The NetBeans UI is incredibly polished and while it might be slower at doing some things (e.g. autocompletion), it has a few features that I can't live without.

Check out the "Find Next/Previous Matching Word" keyboard shortcuts. I think it's bound to Ctrl+K and Ctrl+Shift+K by default. I never have to type more than 2 or 3 characters per word in my code. It's almost a complete replacement for the slower Ctrl+Space autocompletion. I really only use Ctrl+Space for reading Javadocs these days.

No, not Bethesda. They're owned by ZeniMax, who also owns Bethesda. It's ZeniMax that has to sign off on it.

id Tech 5 is impressive right now, but so was Quake 3 back in the day. I wouldn't rule out id Tech 5 being open sourced when their next big game is about to be released on id Tech 7.

And what happens when some bartender/server/bar owner has a grudge against someone and throws them on the banned list out of spite? Now somebody who is perfectly innocent can't get into any of the bars in Victoria.

I think you missed the point. The API is not the language. The language is the language. To put it in words that you will understand: The API is shit, the language is not.

Yes, the DOM is not great and it's implementation in IE is worse. But jQuery and other libraries do make it much nicer to work with, which is what the original guy was trying to say.

Mod this guy up. I'm really sick of people bashing JavaScript when they really mean to bash the DOM and its inadequacies and cross browser woes.

Please, if you want to sound intelligent when talking about the problems with JavaScript, make sure you're talking about the language, not the APIs available in the browser. That part is called the DOM.

I was ready to jump on you when I read the title of your post, but you're right, mostly. JavaScript is actually a really nice language to develop in (for small projects). With features such as lambdas, closures, and functions as first class objects, you can write some very elegant solutions with very little code.

Even with those features it's still stuck in the dark ages when compared to other modern languages. Prototypal inheritance, while cool, doesn't really offer the power that classical inheritance gives you when you're creating large systems. There's no such thing as super in prototypal inheritance, which gets annoying after a while.

Lately I've been looking into Flex and ActionScript 3. AS3 is basically what EcmaScript 4 was going to be before Microsoft derailed it. It's basically Java with a different syntax, a few extra features (lambdas, closures, namespaces), and no equivalent to abstract. It's really nice.

While I'm all for HTML5 and open standards, I highly doubt that it will ever be able to keep up with proprietary solutions like Flex. There's always going to be that big asshole in the corner who refuses to keep his browser up to date with everyone else. I've written large programs in JavaScript and its just far too stressful trying to keep IE-compliance. Until Microsoft or IE are dead and buried, I'm going to have more fun writing Flex apps that run on all browsers and all platforms without any platform specific code.

I can't decide whether your post should be wrapped in <sarcasm> tags or not. Absolutely everything you have said goes against modern HTML/CSS/JS best practices. The table element should only be used for displaying... wait for it... tabular data!

Also, why would you think Flex was free when there are clearly marked "Buy Now" links all over the Adobe product page? Yes there is a free SDK available, but anybody with any sense at all would know that Adobe is a company that makes money. I just don't know why you switched your whole project over to Flex when you hadn't even spent more than 5 minutes researching it.

I'd like to know the name of the company you work for so that I can know to steer clear.

I don't remember the last time Flash crashed my browser. Poorly written JavaScript takes down Firefox far more frequently for me.

The only thing that really gives me grief is Adobe Reader, but that's easily fixable by using the PDF Download add-on for Firefox or using a different PDF reader, like Foxit.

And how do you know that? Yes they've announced the software updates, but they haven't denied nor confirmed that there will be a hardware upgrade this summer.

Personally I'm holding out for the next hardware upgrade. I have an iPod Touch and I love it, but the CPU is just too slow to make rendering rich web pages an enjoyable experience.