| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Many languages (probably most of them) prevent many of the bugs C makes | easy to create. Many of them are better than java. When I was an undergrad at University of Waterloo, we were required to use FORTRAN (WatFiv). I hated it. I liked the notation of Algol better and Algol-W (W for Wirth) was a good implementation for student uses. I even created a bit of a rebellion, but it was put down. The answer was going to be PL/I. But PLIWAT never got done. (Luckily, I missed having WatBol (COBOL) imposed on me. But I was a spear carrier in that project. I worked on optimizing COMASS execution; COMASS was used to implement Z1, a systems implementation language used to write WATBOL.) In your era, did they forced JAVA on you? If so, I would understand hating it. Why, in particular, do you think JAVA is a bad general purpose language for ordinary programmers? Note: I don't actually know JAVA. I know reasons why you or I might dislike it: - essentially cannot be statically compiled - uses UTF-16 (I think). The worst representation of UNICODE. - the library is a sprawling mess. I'd guess that it is impossible to master - traditional JAVA programming style creates a surfeit of abstractions, making it hard to understand what's actually going on - implementations are very fat. For performance reasons, jitting is used. This adds another layer of separation between your program and real hardware. - tuning JAVA program performance seems to too-often devolve into blindly twiddling knobs on the JVM. - JAVA cannot be improved: so much inertia, so horrible governance. What are your reasons? Those reasons don't make it a horrible teaching language, especially if you subset the library.