Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

Either you care about the future and prestige of your platform, or you don't (COBOL).

If you do care about the prestige of the JVM, the future is still definitely awesome. Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all of the other wonderful languages provide a common base for interoperability. That's pretty sweet.

Java the language, as a secure place to get a job is entirely separate from that. Making bank (ha) off of other people's past poor technology choices isn't a future for your tools. It may be an economic opportunity, but it's not a future.

And if all you care about is having a job and writing lines of code, sure, legacy code base work is fine. But some of us care about more.

Nowadays there are other languages and toolkits out there that bring me better joy on a daily basis. C-based languages are not the issue here (I love Objective-C), it's the frameworks and patterns that soured my interest in Java. IoC, dependency injection, xml config this, facade that - for today's speed of 'innovation' and time to market, the Java universe for development can be too big and slow.

Most of the people I've run into post-'06 don't use Java anymore. These are usually small startups (as I don't do enterprise anymore) and the names that always come out are Python, Php, Ruby/Rails, Obj-C, JS, and even Scala. In my mind this is telling of where things are going, just like the early days of Java when people still used Perl and C++ for web. I think Java's continual evolution (or at least usage of the JVM) into things like Scala and Clojure are good things. But it's glory days being at the forefront of web development are behind it.

Ultimately I think this as fine as every dog has its day. Someone will come up with the next greatest thing that everyone will flock to. But like all the other names I've mentioned, Java will be around in many shapes and forms because, like Cobol, some businesses and users will still need it.

Java is mostly-ubiquitous and is "good enough" for a number of common tasks, and has good enough structure for mediocre programmers working on important-but-uninteresting problems. As a result (and the blog author says this), there is enough hate-worthy Java code there, just as there used to be enough hate-worthy C and C++ code around, and there probably is enough hate-worthy COBOL and Ada code around, if you know where to look.

It's worth noting that the relationship between C++ and Java switched around in the last 12 years or so - before, C++ was the method of choice to write segfaulting bug-ridden Windows applications (MFC anyone?), whereas Java was a rather slow (as in, non-JIT-ted) language that was up and coming and was interesting because it combined familiar C-like syntax with garbage collection.

Fast forward, and we have not only smart pointers (which ease many headaches of non-garbage-collected C++) but also template metaprogramming which really took off and makes C++ much more palatable to the one-man-army approach (i.e., one smart guy who does work that would take several mediocre programmers otherwise). Java has also evolved - Java 1.2's List/Map/Set are much nicer than the old collections, and Java 1.5's generics help avoid much of the old ugliness - but it carefully avoids any constructs that would make it more useful for one-man-army stuff - where Rubyists and Pythonistas are monkey-patching metaclass decorators, the Java world has one or two libraries that do bytecode generation to do something useful, but nothing more magic.

People who hate Java are really out against the programmer-as-a-fungible-resource way of living where programming is treated like shoveling dirt instead of a creative activity. Programming is both - perspiration and inspiration - and some people will be allowed to chose their tools (Java or not) whereas other people are not or have to fight for it.

Also a point concerning most language wars is that quite a few are initiated by people with interests on the contender; that is, the language authors, software vendors, etc.