Java is 10: q&a

I got a questionnaire, and below are my answers; I might be ridiculously wrong, so why not publish it here too...


> 1. How did you begin programming in Java? Did you
> choose it or did Java "happen" to you because of
> your educational or work environment? If you were
> starting today, would you choose Java again?

It was in Russia. It was 1996; rumors started reaching us that there is such a clumsy, inefficient language - and I was immediately interested. In 1997 I took a Java manual as a vacation reading, and spent time on the beach immersed in the beauty of it. And I just switched to Java, declared C++ a legacy language, and never returned to it.
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It seems like Java, in its present form, is a little bit higher than the average level of modern developers. At least several years may pass before the features that already are there get adopted by the programming world. For instance, it seems like not more than 5% of Java programmers can handle Java generics. How many can embrace Lock/Condition? Hard to tell: nobody knows yet about this new powerful mechanism that replaces synchronized/wait/notify.

And I have no clue how to use annotations.

So, I think Java has at least 7 years until people start using it - but Java can still develop dramatically, as we saw in the case of Tiger.