The father of "Cobol for the 21st Century" says, "Stop being productive!"
James Gosling, the "father of Java," has called on developers to stop using Emacs because his own company's IDE, Netbeans, "fits together components well" and has kept up with Moore's Law whereas Emacs has not.
As I see it, what he's saying is that one should tackle a steep learning curve and adopt a power-hungry monstrosity written in a non-cross-platform languange like Java, rather than use what used to laughingly referred to as "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" but has, over time, become lean, mean, and definitely user-friendly (although it's picky about who it's friends are).
And pimping a Java package is just absurd: Java, despite being less than 15 years old, already has a reputation similar to Cobol: it's a downslope language if ever there was one: you get paid big bucks to write in it because it's a boring language popular with big, faceless corporations with a lot of legacy work, not because it's an interesting and career-worthy language that excites developers. Every Java programmer I know would rather be working in something more spicy and productive like Python, Ruby, or (Gods help us all) Haskell, or getting down closer to the heavy metal and doing high-performance C/C++ stuff. Java is a hellish limbo with neither the "portable assembly" of C nor the developer productivity curve of modern languanges.
And as for IDEs, I find Emacs is simply more productive than anything else. Gosling's wrong about how "the only thing that's been added since 1984 is syntax highlighting"; he's never used the outlining, organizing, mind-mapping, revision-tracking and indexing tools. You can take Emacs out of my cold, dead hands only when you present me with something better.
Heck, my LJ entries are written with Emacs.
As I see it, what he's saying is that one should tackle a steep learning curve and adopt a power-hungry monstrosity written in a non-cross-platform languange like Java, rather than use what used to laughingly referred to as "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" but has, over time, become lean, mean, and definitely user-friendly (although it's picky about who it's friends are).
And pimping a Java package is just absurd: Java, despite being less than 15 years old, already has a reputation similar to Cobol: it's a downslope language if ever there was one: you get paid big bucks to write in it because it's a boring language popular with big, faceless corporations with a lot of legacy work, not because it's an interesting and career-worthy language that excites developers. Every Java programmer I know would rather be working in something more spicy and productive like Python, Ruby, or (Gods help us all) Haskell, or getting down closer to the heavy metal and doing high-performance C/C++ stuff. Java is a hellish limbo with neither the "portable assembly" of C nor the developer productivity curve of modern languanges.
And as for IDEs, I find Emacs is simply more productive than anything else. Gosling's wrong about how "the only thing that's been added since 1984 is syntax highlighting"; he's never used the outlining, organizing, mind-mapping, revision-tracking and indexing tools. You can take Emacs out of my cold, dead hands only when you present me with something better.
Heck, my LJ entries are written with Emacs.