Why JavaTM works

Since 1985 I have been programming mainly in C and some assembler (yuck) I must have coded hundreds of thousands of lines and thought that after 60 or more years of program language research 'C' was the all healing remedy and the 'best' the language designers could come up with...
However, I still think that the language has the worst syntax someone could possibly think up, and Didier Mougan the guy who taught 'C' programming to me had the same opinion. Didier is an expert on OOP and had used several other languages like Smalltalk and ADA before. He decided to create some preprocessor commands to make 'C' source code more readable. This resulted in source code looking more like BASIC (yeah I hear you guys shouting "HOW DARE HE !") or ADA. Since that early time I have been using this style of coding and I am confident that it makes source code more readable - you know... at that time we did not have editors which search and highlight 'lost' } brackets. Can you imagine, we had an editor (Wordstar) and the complete compiler on one 360 KByte diskette.

Then some clever guy decided to put some object oriented extensions into 'C' and it became 'C++'. I never quite understood what was '++' about it as it was the same old sh... just in a new package, so I refused to jump onto the bandwagon until something better would come along....

1995 something better had finally arrived (fanfares, drum roll...) JavaTM.

I bought the book 'Teach yourself Java in 24 hours' - yeah right I though... After having read about half the book and even coded some of the useless examples I decided to do something real with Java. And as OS/2 (OS/2 used to be my favourite OS) came with built in Java I could start right off.

The first project I came up with was a POP3 mail notifier which resembles the one seen in the movie 'Disclosure' with Demy Moore and Michael Douglas.

The nice thing about Java is the fact that it is operating system independent and that alone makes it my new favourite programming language. Being able to write an application which runs on any platform is what the programming world needed - of cause Bill Gates' Micro$oft doesn't like it, but I think this time they lost the war !
Java is so powerfull and all the built in classes make life real easy ! Everytime I have to code something is 'C' or BASIC (yeah folks it's still out there) I feel like I exchanged a Ferrari with a Ford Model T - and I hate that feeling....

Since 1997 I am a 100% "pure Java guy", member of the JavaLobby and a Java evangelist. In several projects I have developed servers and frontends with Java and never, even one time Java let me down !

So why didn't you write your web page in java then, I hear you ask ? The answer is that I don't want to waste anyone's time waiting for java applets to finally load on their browsers. I see the real strength of Java in application development. And that is what I did for my former employer FIDUCIA IT AG. They are meanwhile running one of the largest Java applications in the banking sector with more than 40M Transactions per day created entirely through Java.

That's why Java Works for me and I am confident it will work for you too !

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