"Even Microsoft has orphaned you by going with HTML5 and JavaScript for Metro interfaces. "

Microsoft had Silverlight, which was designed to compete against Flash. When the mobile platforms exploded, and both Apple and Google said, "Fsk Flash!" Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Why continue to invest in a platform that wasn't going to be supported on the fastest growing market segment? If Microsoft had continued with Silverlight/WPF for Metro it would have been a ridiculously dumb technical decision. Going to HTML 5 and JavaScript libraries was the logical choice.

".NET is the Zune "

I believe the Zune platform was primarily C/C++, which currently blows Java out of the water for popular programming languages.

"Java is the iPod"

Lol, no. The iPod is C/Objective-C. Even the new stuff is Objective-C and Swift. Java is nothing to the Apple platform.

"Can't you see the writing on the wall?"

No, but I can see the Tiobe index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Which sure seems to point out the exact opposite. Java is losing ground, .Net framework languages are gaining. Not 1-for-1 mind you, but the trend is opposite of your bemoaning.

As for the CEO you quoted, he doesn't appear to understand what it is that the .Net framework and the JVM are actually doing. Either that, or he is expressing an opposition to all high level programming languages (.Net and Java included). In either case, it doesn't really make your point for you other than noting that someone has drank the anti-MS coolaide and is making irrational decisions based on it.

-Rick

I'm thinking you may want to take a look in the mirror on accusations of denial.

Java is a good programming language, but seeing as how it has lost almost 50% of it's market penetration over the last 12 years while C# and VB.Net have both increased their market penetration significantly over the same time would imply that factually speaking, Java is not "taking over". If anything, it is being replaced.

Not necessarily by .Net languages, with the transition to mobile platforms Objective-C/Swift are taking the place of what would have historically been Java apps.

And even as you mentioned, PHP and Python are also replacing Java.

The point I would make is that having multiple programming languages available to us is GOOD! I prefer working within Visual Studio, but I am glad that Java exists. Because if Microsoft ever does go belly up, I'm going to need another mainstay to jump to. Likewise, if Java goes through yet another fragmentation, I like knowing that I can drop an increasingly convoluted support structure and switch to the .Net framework.

Options are good. We don't need, nor do we even want a "winner" in this market. If going open source opens another option to compete with Java on the LAMP stack, AWESOME! If Open.Net put's Java at risk, LAME!

Put the coolaide down, go share a beer with your fellow developers, C# and Java alike, and sit there ragging on the Fortran/Cobol programmers :P

-Rick

Most of our problems with MEB have been tied to the WebSphere and SVN integration features. The devs have been working with the tools team to get it worked out, so I'm not in the details on each issue. But I was getting reports of "delayed for 2 hours due to MEB" pretty much daily from multiple projects and teams. The department as a whole, across ~40 developers, has viewed the upgrade as severely negative and it has sparked talks of switching to Eclipse and other tools.

I'd agree with you on the databases being orthogonal. I was just pointing out that the parent's point about .Net requiring SQL Server was factually incorrect. While I strongly prefer SQL Server because the tools that are included, and the 3rd party tools available, make certain aspects of software development, release management, and debugging sooooo much easier. Oracle has many similar tools, but again, the price is a tough pill to swallow, and in my experience, they don't have the same UX polish that MS has put together in the SQL Server tools. When the Free Toad fork went out of active development 10 years ago and it's still considered one of the better tools to work with Oracle through, it kinda says something about the quality of tools available to Oracle.

I believe you are correct on SharePoint, at least I've never implemented it on anything other than SQL Server, and giving it's reliance on in-document searching and the MS text search engine, I'd be very surprised to find out that it could run on a different back end.

There is an affinity as well between IIS and .Net. I believe you can run .Net sites off of Apache on Windows, but I would wager you would have a much lighter support community.

And while Mono and the MS Open initiative are breaking the affinity between .Net and Windows, that relationship will always exist. At this point though, I'm much less interested in WPF. Not because there is anything wrong with it (Honestly, a true vector based layout engine is soooo much better than dealing with flow based layout of HTML), but because the war is over, Web killed the desktop app. There are very few scenarios where a desktop app is still necessary, especially in the LOB environment that the majority of development is involved.

Don't get me wrong, Java is a great language. Not drinking the coolaid here. I'll jump to PHP or C++, or Java as the project requires. But Visual Studio is by far the strongest, most stable, and feature rich IDE available on the market.

-Rick

This is only true in an extremely narrow scope of costs analysis.

Yes, Eclipse is free, unless you are using My Eclipse or any other paid tool for additional functionality. At $150 a year for a subscription license, it's still not as expensive as Visual Studio Pro's $680 price tag.

And across a team of 20 developers, I'm going to blow $10k on licenses (assuming I'm not getting a volume discount or maintaining a Silver/Gold partner status).

But there are other costs. For example, my team just upgraded to the latest version of MEB. To call it a cluster-fuck would be an understatement. All told across the team, between the upgrade itself, and issues with the new IDE we spent 200+ hours of labor. We took 1 guy off of his project and had him become the "MEB issue guy" and he spent 2 weeks just walking around helping other devs when they ran into issues with the IDE and build. Figure it costs the company on average $50+/hr for labor on my team. This one upgrade has cost us even more than the $10k in additional license costs I would have paid for VS2013.

And that's not even getting into the data side of the house. Our Oracle license cost an arm and a leg compared to our SQL Server licenses. And .Net apps have no problem what so ever connecting to any data source you have. If there is a connection driver for it, .Net can connect to it. SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Lotus, almost all of the NoSQL databases. And with Entity Framework I get the power of persistent objects without the hassle of crap fest of Hibernate.

Java is a great tool. And it blow MS/.Net out of the water for cross-platform development, no questions asked. But when it comes to LOB applications, working with the .Net stack is just so much easier.

Now, if you're getting into super high performance stuff, ditch Java and .Net and move back in to the realm of C. Although, I'd still rather use VS2013 for C development ;)

-Rick

"EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."

This is not an accurate statement.

It is however accurate to say that individuals that are racist are statistically more likely to vote republican.

I would like to believe that the majority of Republicans are not openly racist. But the fact that the majority of open racists are Republicans isn't really up for debate. I'd link a bunch of research studies that show it, but I'm on the work network ;)

In addition to the racist issue, there is also the privilege issue. And with lower minority participation, the Republican party definitely skews in favor of those with privilege.

-Rick

Except Michael Brown was no Martin Luther King. King would have been appalled by the circumstances into which Brown's family launched him through neglect of his character. King would have been disgusted by Brown, who spend the morning smoking dope, robbing a convenience store to get more supplies, and then assaulting a cop. King would likewise have been disgusted by people chanting in the streets about things that didn't happen, outraged by their willingness to destroy people's property and burn down their neighborhood businesses, or shout in large organized groups about wanting to see dead cops NOW!

No, things are very different now than they were even 20 years ago. Worse, when it comes to that sort of thing.

Well I definitely give you points for being so tenacious in your attempt to pretend you still understand the conversation.

Another poster says that people are wrong to point out Obama's failures, because look at all of the things HE accomplished. Except, HE didn't do those things. He's not responsible for them. The Bin Laden take-down had essentially zero to do with him or any policy on his part, other than, "Yeah, keep doing what you started doing under Bush, until we get that guy." I'm pointing out that the person trying to fish around for some way to show Obama as a success, is attributing to him personally things for which he is not responsible. But you keep attacking that straw man, if it makes you feel better. Nobody is fooled, and I doubt you're even fooling yourself.

Accountants look at the operating costs of a retail store as part and parcel of that store's profitability. Locks on doors, anti-theft devices on displays - those security systems and the people who maintain and support them are costs that impact the profitability of the store. Nobody running a real business pretends that the costs of operating that retail store aren't part of that store's profitability picture. Multi-store overhead (like, say, a loss prevention specialist who spends time at all of the stores) is still part of that store's P&L - her salary is charged to multiple accounts, so that each store's bottom line feels that cost.

In other words, you don't have anything germane to say on the subject, just snark that's disconnected from reality. That's exactly my point.

As I asked another poster: is a company's retail store a profit center? Are the locks on the front door part of that profit center?

So inside a retail store are thousands and thousands of tiny little cost centers? Does that mean that the retail store is also thousands and thousands of tiny little profit centers?

Or would a rational person perhaps look at the store as a profit center because it makes money, despite having overhead costs like ... the screws that hold the front door to its hinges? Or is each of those screws a cost center, in your view?

How about the display cases that hold the jewelry in the store?

How about the cash registers?

How about the front door?

Is every last bit of overhead inside a profit center a tiny, microscopic cost center?

So, a company's money-making, walk-up retail storefront isn't a profit center?

So, all VPNs are "the internet?"

It wasn't "out there." It was "in there." They had the compromised credentials for a top-level system admin, and spent months on the internal network collecting goodies before laying waste to the system.