Sometimes peer pressure is strong enough to be palpable.

I have a tendency to be contrarian because I don't believe in the wisdom of the masses.

I'm usually right. 

But I'm never contrarian enough to hit the jackpot and become wealthy.

So, you throw your garbage out of the car window on the highway?

Being "contrarian" should be incidental to being "right".

Someone who labels themselves as "contrarian" are being interested in being contrarian as a goal.

If you are "usually right", you'd be weathly. Since you aren't wealthy, your success at being "right" probably is not very remarkable.

I'm right where I opt to participate :)

If I had a million bucks, I'd probably be able to grow it pretty well.

The first million is the hardest.

Yeah, being contrarian is fun, especially when you can back it up in some way.

The problem with betting on being contrarian, even when you're right or at least right enough to eventually get some payback, is that you have to be in it for the really long haul because it takes forever and a day for people to relinquish their conventional wisdom.

My mISV thing was too contrarian really and although the people it was supposed to be useful to could see it was useful and would have ROI, I think they perceived the technical risk as being too high.  My bad in the end.

Here, some free contrarianism :)

Conventional wisdom:
Java is a modern, powerful and useful programming language for business applications.

Actuality:
Java is a poorly suited to business applications and the development productivity is no better than COBOL.

That's just crazy talk, Clouseau.  There's some pressure you just can't go against.

Bring back COBOL?  RFLMAO. Even if it made all the sense in the world, you'd drown under the weight of the forces against going back to it.

I am convinced that making a lot of money is all about ... making a lot of money.  I don't think it matches up with being contrian or follow the masses.

For example, if your goal ... early on in life was to make money, then I am sure by now you would have a lot of money.

I remember when I was 19 in college, there was a friend that dropped out of college to make big money selling cars.  He made 100k his first year and got a free car.  I am sure he is probably rich by now.  That is what he wanted to do.

It seems that your goal (sharkfish) now is to be in IT doing development?  If you are making a salary, that goal is not in line with becoming wealthy.

For example, it looks like even in IT, the goal of the core entrepreneurs is to make a lot of money and maybe 20-30% of their focus is on the technical aspects of their project.

So, if you want to be wealthy.  You should do nothing but focus on being wealthy.  You could work for a car dealership, make money that way.  Possibly quit your job and do real-estate.

Oh yea, you are black and maybe there isn't a history money or trusts in your family you could borrow off of.

LOL, I wasn't suggesting one could bring back COBOL or fight Java.  I'm not that crazy.

More just saying "the emperor has no clothes".

Are you feeling all right Bot? That almost sounds like complete sense.

"LOL, I wasn't suggesting one could bring back COBOL or fight Java.  I'm not that crazy. "

COBOL hasn't gone anywhere.  Ask IBM, they make millions off COBOL solutions.

>For example, it looks like even in IT, the goal of the core entrepreneurs is to make a lot of money and maybe 20-30% of their focus is on the technical aspects of their project.

Absolutely true.

I know Bot, I'm sure Sharky meant trying to promote COBOL other than in it's legacy settings.

Which would be stupid because COBOL is shite.  It's just that the actual productivity of Java isn't mmuch better, which is kind of pathetic 30 years along.

I've been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  He seems to think that being successful has a lot to do with being lucky.  E.g. rich lawyers in NY tend to be jews born around 1930.  Pro hockey players tend to be born in January.

>I've been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  He seems to think that being successful has a lot to do with being lucky.

At the extreme high end for sure. But most entrepreneurs have a past littered with failed ventures but they kept trying and trying, and eventually they succeed.

Burn your house down.

"It's just that the actual productivity of Java isn't much better, which is kind of pathetic 30 years along."

That comment doesn't mean a whole lot.  But since I work with both, I will help you out.

A lot of Enterprise (banks, finance, the government, big J2EE shops like Wal-mart, brick-mortar companies that are writing web applications) use COBOL a legacy language to interface with their legacy databases.  The databases are critical for the business and have been developed for 20-30 years.  This might include a database full of VISA transactions for the history that they collected VISA purchases.

There may be robust COBOL applications that manipulate the data, backup the data.  For example, give me a report of all retail purchases over the last quarter.  A COBOL batch job won't break, crash, or anything else.  Other languages like Java, Python, or Ruby will not be as robust because these VMs and runtimes don't run within a mainframe environment.

On Java, Java is normally used to interact with the database.  IBM, Sun and Oracle have created stable J2EE application servers that can interface the backend databases.  Outside of just the Java programming language, you may need the J2EE security model, Java messaging, or the other stuff that J2EE has to offer.  There have been many versions of Java (1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and some are using 1.6) so these big companies have tweaked their Java runtimes for maximum scalability.

It is still debateble if Python, Ruby application servers are scalable or not.  And who is going to provide a scalable Rails architecture.  Oracle and IBM provide solutions for J2EE?  Who is the vendor for Django?

Also, you can write JRuby or Jython or Clojure or Scala apps on top of the Java runtime.

"It's just that the actual productivity of Java isn't much better, which is kind of pathetic 30 years along."

So I am always confused by these comments.  They a complete lack of understanding of the Java platform.  And because the Java platform is so common, it also shows a lack of understanding of the software industry.

Wow, Bot took his meds today. Two coherent, insightful posts with good talking points.

Nah. He just had a good weekend, probably finding some real companion in a bar :)

http://berlinbrowndev.blogspot.com/2008/06/is-java-new-cobol-yes-what-does-that_14.html

Nope, I have said the same thing for years.  I have brought it up here several times.

>> "It's just that the actual productivity of Java isn't much better, which is kind of pathetic 30 years along."
>That comment doesn't mean a whole lot.

So, here, I'll help you out since it's apparently really hard to understand.

It means that, statistically speaking, it appears the overall productivity of developers working on projects using Java is not significantly better than those working on projects using COBOL.  And that I consider that fact a little disappointing considering we are 30 years past COBOL's heyday and Java was introduced more than 30 years after COBOL.

Here is a relevant link:
http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v34/v34-5.pdf

[sotto voce]
FFS, no one tell Brice about that link.

The points of Outliers was:
1 - It takes about 10k hours to become great at something.
2 - When a new industry starts to take off, that folks with this 10k hr of skill in the new industry become the "titans of industry" during the window of opportunity.
3 - Once the initial window of opportunity passes, no one else will ever get that big.

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)# 

>Do you know what's interesting about that list? Of the 75 names, an astonishing 14 are Americans born within nine years of each other in the mid 19th century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the Pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.

>What's going on here? The answer is obvious, if you think about it. In the 1860's and 1870's, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railways were built, and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy functioned were broken and remade. What that list says is that it really matters how old you were when that transformation happened.

>If you were born in the late 1840's, you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820's, you were too old: your mindset was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there is a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the 14 men and women on that list had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity.

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt1.html

"Comparing the coefficients of the regression terms, we found Access has the highest productivity while C language has the lowest. As the two prevailing development languages, C++ and Java have the same level of productivity. Whereas Oracle has reasonably high productivity, the productivity of COBOL
is low."

Do you really want to use that article as a basis for your argument.

So, we use JRuby and Jython; JVM languages that run on the Java platform.  How does that factor into your point?  The article doesn't mention JRuby.

The article (which I've had some time, I didn't go looking for it) pretty much tallies with my personal experience and supports what I said about COBOL and Java.  That was all.

Based on the article; are they saying it would take similar amount of time to write a GUI web application using SWT or Swing in Java with whatever GUI framework for COBOL?

I would love to see that.

"my personal experience "

What is your personal experience with those environments?

If you want to know what they're saying, read the article.  They're not saying anything at the level of detail you're asking about.

IANAJP, I have experience with C/C++, Oracle, DB2, 4GLs and selling into mainframe shops against COBOL and PL/1, and it makes me feel the numbers in the article are pretty plausible.

I work alongside a big Java project which is doing so-so and I have to get involved with database, OS and systems integration issues, so I study Java stuff.  I'm not totally impressed obviously.

"I have to get involved with database, OS and systems integration issues, so I study Java stuff."

For the Java, are you talking about:

J2ME - mobile, possible Anroid?
J2SE
J2EE - enterprise/web?

J2ME - mobile, possibly Android?

Went to bed Bot, it was past midnight.

JEE5/JMS/JPA/JCA/JNI/Eclipse RCP clients FWIW.

The annotations in JEE5 are good but they make me smile because basically they're an admission that things were too low level and neeed to be more like a 4GL.

This Java project has been going a few years and has basically been rewritten once already even though nothing has ever been deployed - because of the amount of technology churn in the Java space and perhaps because some of the programmers are wannabe rock stars.

These people thought Entity beans were a great idea.

> It means that, statistically speaking, it appears the
> overall productivity of developers working on projects
> using Java is not significantly better than those
> working on projects using COBOL.  And that I consider
> that fact a little disappointing considering we are 30
> years past COBOL's heyday and Java was introduced more
> than 30 years after COBOL.

I tend to be puzzled by this kind of observation. Why should we expect a big increase in productivity from newer languages?

On any given software project the nature of the problem to be solved and the amount of thinking required to solve it is getting no less complex. It is the abstract problem solving that takes most of the development time in a project, not the mechanics of the tools used to carve out the solution.

Sure, sufficiently primitive languages like macro assembler can slow you down, but once you reach a moderate level of language advancement you encounter a law of diminishing returns. Beyond that point it is the thinking that takes more time and the coding less. So no great gains in productivity are going to be obtained by any general purpose language today or in the future. The only exception consists of niche languages for specialist applications in narrow fields.

So, "There's No Silver Bullet", then?  I agree, and so does Fred Brooks.