Re:software engineering != computer science (Score 1)

I think the authors are looking at one kind of software development and proclaiming that it's the only one that matters. Full disclosure: I did study comp-sci, but I don't have a comp-sci degree. I did, however, have a mom that was a human resources manager an embedded systems company through a formative part of my childhood. Many of the engineers who worked with her were my friends. I learned a lot from them. But I did not grind my way through all of Knuth's work before I started coding. Certainly not before I began to make a living at it.

There are many people for who building valuable systems, even beautiful ones, will never need the kind of knowledge you proclaim "matters". The most interesting program I've seen was written by someone who knew about another field of knowledge very deeply and by the force of his intellectual will he coded something that worked well for him that I would likely have taken much longer to do, even though I can code circles around him. Knowledge about something other than programming can -- and often does -- matter more than knowledge about Computer Science or even software does. If we all waited until we knew enough to know what we were doing, we would never do very much.

As far as Java is concerned, the idea of Java is very important: that your investment in software need not necessarily fall victim to Moore's law in that your hardware can move forward while your code doesn't need to know the difference. Many languages have tried to solve the problem in different ways, some better than others. Java is the only language that seemed to take it seriously to the level that the binary is actually portable and the abstract CPU can be optimized to perform better than the down-to-machine-code compiled ones with "knowledge" of the native CPU. So now Java routinely out paces other languages (including C!) in real world problems. I, for one, think this is great!