Throughout history, at various times and various places, there have been (as Mark Twain indicated) exaggerated reports of death.  A recent post about the state of the Java programming language may share a similar fate:

http://esj.com/articles/2012/01/09/state-of-java-jvm-2012.aspx

Within a global culture of increasingly short attention spans, waiting 26-years for a programming platform (including source language, debuggers, diagnostic/testing/deployment tools etc.) to mature, like we did with COBOL, may be agony for some.  Is the allure of change stronger than the discipline of maturation?

I remember getting all excited about Computer Assisted Software Engineering (CASE) in the late 80′s.  And then in the late 90′s getting suckered-in to development with EJB v. 1.0 Entity Beans.  With the best of intentions and great enthusiasm I contributed to poor business decisions that ended up costing my clients money.

Is there any evidence to suggest that the human species can mature a computing platform in less than 26 years?  The good news, for short attention spans, is an expectation that by the end of this decade Java will be mature!

So after 30 years of writing code… my lesson learned is that “new” is not always “better”… and that “new” is never “mature”.

_Marvin