What is the Great Britain trying to prove?
That when you do the electronic equivalent of going up to the victims relatives and saying "Ha Ha, He raped and killed your daughter last week", you can expect the authorities to step in and put an end to your attempted breach of the peace.
I doubt it is in Mocrosoft's interest to kill the ecosystem. It will leave every MS dependant hardware or software vendor looking for a transition strategy to Apple/Linux/Nintendo/Sony/Android. I guess many will already have woken up and decided "No more purposefully buggy DSDT tables, no more half-hearted Linux support", though I guess Asus and Adobe will snooze a while longer.
Linux damaged the Solaris market, and Intel x86 made Sparc a less compelling hardware platform.
Java kept Sun distracted as their core revenue streams were eroded.
As Sun tried to turn Java into a revenue stream, they diverted money, technical expertise and management attention from Solaris and Sparc. Java (particularly JavaEE) also made their acquisitions (Forte etc) difficult as Sun tried to shoehorn Java into products that didn't need it.
So I reassert that java helped kill Sun.
Its worth noting that Oracle are not overly distracted by Java. They are getting the jvm and core language sorted out without blowing billions doing it.
My personal view on JAVA is don't let the door hit you hard on the ass on the way out. And good riddence.
Yup, Java helped kill Sun. If Android knows whats good for it, it will drop Java in favour of better languages and native compilation, possibly Qt as the toolset and D or C++ as the compiler with javascript and python support too.
COBOL has older applications, and the only way to become an old application is to start with a sound architecture. So they are probably just looking at a survivorship bias issue than a language or programmer experience issue.
It would be nice to see application age and programmer experience controlled for.
Actually, economists predict crashes all of the time.
For instance, right now there are some people predicting a UK housing market crash of about 20% in the next year. If theres no crash this year, they'll just move forwards to next year. Eventually they'll be right, and will parade their insight for all to see.
Theres a few annoying quirks around the duck typing ( e.g. 01234 gets treated as an octal number, bloody stupid decision)
typeof is useless
The class system is a bit klunky, but I'd far prefer it to something like Java where OO mandatory and you soon end up abstractFactoryFactoryGetter'd up the wazoo.
There is no native include directive.
But most of the problems are with a certain browsers inconsistent use of the DOM, dodgy standards support and bizarre bugs that never get fixed.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."