[nylug-talk] Why does "enterprise" imply "Java"?

[Dan Crosta]

So... in summary, would it be fair to say that Java itself is no more
enterprisey than Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc? And that, instead, the APIs
and more importantly the (free?) reference implementations of them are
what distinguishes *J2EE* (not Java) from the rest of the pack?

If that's the case, wouldn't it be possible to replicate those APIs in,
say, Python, and to reimplement (albeit probably slower) reference
implementations using, eg, Jython to bridge between the two language
runtimes, and later reimplement them natively when the time is right?
If that's the case, then why haven't we seen that? (Or have we?)
It might just be that it's unneccesary, that nobody out there wants to use
the same APIs in another language?

On the other hand, I've had some interesting conversations with a friend
of mine about the nature of the language of Java itself vs. C++, Python,
Perl, etc. In our opinion, Java is a more... bureaucratic language than
many of the others. There's a lot of syntactic overhead, and it very
strongly encourages you to use certain patterns, and to resist others (it
wasn't until very recently that Java gained true generics support, in 1.5
if memory serves, before which you had to pretend that everything was
possible with downcasting and object heirarchies).

In case you haven't noticed, Java's not exactly my favorite language. I
have a hard time explaining exactly why, but I end up feeling exhuasted
after a day programming Java, infuriated after a day programming C++, and
exhilirated after a day programming Python.

Anyway, that's my $0.02.

dsc