A talk given at UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business, on June 25, 2004.

Bruce is an author of very famous Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java books.

streaming video (2 hrs 16 mins)

on first 50 mins, he covers

• garbage collection is the way for new languages to go — program managability
• problems with Java’s checked exception
• Java just has too many ‘words’ (too long code) — maintainability
• classpath nightmare — At the very least we need a equivalent of “which” (in Unix)
• Applets have failed
• Truly “Write Once, Run Anywhere” from other camps — Microsoft XAML + Aurora vs Macromedia Flash + MXML + Flex
• Java on Desktop
• Eclipse 3.0 as a rich client platform
• Java is good on server
• developers: write once learning curve (Java is bad. too complex)
• users: seamlessly run anywhere (Java is bad, too complex)
• JDK 5.0 new features: generics, autoboxing, enumerations, attributes/metadata, new concurrency, syntax improvements (e.g. for-each) — competition is good
• …

with a lot mentionings to Python