Freud somewhere talks about a primitive tribe where the punishment for saying "The king is not an ass" is the same as for saying "The king is an ass".

Edit: I remember reading this years ago and have been unable to track it down. Would love it if somebody did.

Probably in Totem and Taboo? This concept is expressed in a number of his books, however.

Oh if you could find it I would be super grateful. I've done my usual rounds such as searching on Google Books and found nothing. Made me start to wonder if it had been Jung instead.

I haven't read that before, but I am wondering if that is related to that specific phenomenon, or rather if it's disrespectful to refer to the king, and say "ass" in the same sentence. Do you remember?

Yes, the example was to illustrate that the unconscious doesn't process negation the way the conscious mind does. The fact that you said the king is not an ass proves that you had the idea that he is. So I think your alternate interpretation of the principle is not so different from the first. The claim is that negation is a logical/abstract construct that exists at a higher cognitive level not recognized by the (allegedly) more primitive unconscious, which deals in concrete language and images.

Another way to put it is that psychologically, a statement and its negation are not opposites but rather go together. The same idea comes up in hypnosis, where it is said that the unconscious mind drops the "not" and simply receives the images that are given. For the same reason, it's better to say "Remember" than "Don't forget", which is a kind of subliminal invitation to forget. And so on.

It somewhat surprises me that they'd not want Java to become the new COBOL. COBOL is still alive, still runs large systems, and still sells hardware and software. Owning the new COBOL has the potential to be quite lucrative in the long term.

I don't think so, Although I agree with you that COBOL is still alive and kicking. That is totally different that being used for awesome projects and by start ups.

If Oracle's plan is to keep Java alive as a glue for their DB that strategy would work fine.

But it would be a long term disaster in terms of overall innovation, and long term viability for choosing everyday projects.

Choosing Java for everyday projects is a long term disaster?

What about Android apps?

What about solid back-end?

What about Google AppEngine-Java?

People are still using Java for everyday projects and I don't see a disaster coming anytime soon.

According to me the disaster has already occurred. The only section of programmers using Java day in and out for their projects are low price substandard developers who can't write a line of code without the IDE doing autocomplete at every key stroke.

Coming to Android and other Google initiative they tend to happen only because the tooling, documentation support and a large pool of programmers that exist.

Java today is not used because its awesome, its used because for a certain section of industry needs massive supply of low price programmers. And with Java the people, the tooling support and rest is already there.

Hence no doubt Java is the next COBOL.

I do Java in my day job and I agree, I couldn't write much Java code without an IDE, mainly because Java is a horrible language to cut code in and you do need to write a lot of boilerplate for many Java EE patterns.

The IDE removes that problem somewhat.

It's not that Java coders "can't write a line of code without an IDE", it's Java coders don't have the patience to write pure Java in a text editor.

You're also forgetting that a lot of enterprise applications consist of many many .java source files for each class. Trying to deal with all of that manually becomes a real headache

I don't know why anybody would create a headache and then try to cure it.

Intelligent people avoid headaches.

Prevention is better than cure. And IDE is a cure, Avoid what forces you to resort to a cure. Prevent the disease itself.

I use a few prog. langs. and still prefer Java in many cases because the tooling is more advanced than any other language platforms.

Thank you for insulting Hadoop, Hbase, Cassandra, GWT commiters and developers at Google, Twitter, LinkedIN, and many more smart people who happened to choose Java.

Nice reply with no factual support.

I don't if its 'chose' or 'forced to choose' by pointy haired managers, mate!

By the way when given the choice its clear what the founders choose. Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose C++ and Python and Mark Zuckerberg chose Php. Twitter started out on Rails.

So its clear the Java mess seeps in only when the hackers are cleared from the scene and the layers of management begin to take control.

Yup, Paul Buchheit was somehow forced to use Java to write GMail with q gun in his head or something. And somehow Twitter engineers was forced to use Java because management said so...

I don't even want to know how you came into these conclusions. They don't make any sense at all.

Java was 3 years old when Google started off. Did you get the link where one of the founders was asking question about Java back in 98 regarding web development? Did you know that Java has been used for many many years inside Google when these so called hackers were still working there?

Did you know that Twitter actually gets more stable when they migrated to Scala and Java? Did you check the presentation by Twitter engineer as to why they moved away? Those are technical presentations, not management business type of presentation. Are you suggesting that rails hackers were the culprit of all Twitter scalability iscsues?

I am unsure if we live in the same world mate.

I don't get the impression that Oracle really cares about startups. It costs a shitload to license Oracle, and the companies that fork out that kind of money do so because they're running SAP or Siebel, PeopleSoft, data warehousing, legacy LOB apps, etc.

There's lots of old, conservative, slowly changing companies out there that have craploads of money and need (for certain meanings of the term) Oracle. Having control over Java gives them a lot more leverage in those markets, too.

It's never occurred to me to think of Oracle as being a company concerned with any of those things. It seems totally outside their character, everything they do screams "huge, established customers only".

The current crop of smaller companies and bootstrappers will evolve in to the next generation's "established" companies. No one is starting a company today with COBOL. How many are starting today with Java? Not rhetorical - I know some are - just wondering how this will play out over time...

There are only three factors Java is getting used today.

    1. 'Hiring the cheap programmer' factor.
    2. 'The Oracle' factor.
    3. 'The pointy haired boss' factor.

And those are not awesome reasons to stay alive.

Interesting. I'm actually using Java on projects, but via Groovy. Others I know are coming from Ruby in to Clojure. So, "Java" as such isn't the direct factor, but JVM is a common one. Will it be enough to keep it from COBOL-status?

JVM based languages are totally different.

I remember Bjarne Stroustrup telling Java isn't platform independent, Java is the platform. Meaning compiled C++ runs on processors directly, but compiled Java runs on JVM. So JVM becomes analogous to a processor.

So comparing JVM based languages is like comparing languages directly compiled to a processor like a ARM processor. Future of JVM is different than future of Java.

Just like future of C++ is different than future of pentium.

On the other hand, not acknowledging what everyone is saying can make you look out of touch.

The only word that's wrong in that language is "new". Java's been COBOL for as long as it's been around.

That's like shouting "Punk's not dead!" as you preen your greying mohawk.

For years, some in the Java community (and programming community in general) have been claiming that Java is the new COBOL, so this is a refutation of that assertion. They are not fools, they just expect their audience is aware of the context.