About 8 years ago corporate America was fed the line that JAVA was the key to all of their compatibility problems. The argument was that JAVA could be written once and run anywhere. So big business started to convert to JAVA without actually finding out if it worked or not. I can remember liking the language. It was object oriented, but not as complex as C++. I could code in it quickly and easily.

My favorite JAVA story is that I was going up to the top floor and the Chief Technical Officer got in the elevator with me. He asked me about Java and I said that I thought it was a good fit for one of the new projects. He then asked me what the initials J.A.V.A stood for. I said “coffee” and he didn’t believe me.

Huge projects were built based on JAVA. IBM built a whole Web App server called WebSphere based on Java. After a few years of expansion and multiple layers of completely unnecessary abstraction, JAVA apps became so heavy that they refused to run.

I say all of this because I tried to log into my Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield account for the first time. I am on the third page. Each page takes about 10 minutes to paint. The system is written in – you guessed it – JAVA.

I just read where the YouTube site is completely written with PHP and MySQL. These are light weight, low impact, simple tools for websites. If YouTube can handle all of their traffic, which is thousands of times greater than Empire BC/BS without a hiccup, why can’t JAVA handle a few thousand users without slowing to a crawl? The reason is that JAVA programmers created bloated slow moving whales of programs. It is in the nature of the language to bog down. The sooner the tech officers at large companies realize that PHP is write once, run everywhere and also runs very very fast and it is FREE, the sooner I can give up working with a dying language and enjoy programming again.

The picture up at the top of this post was grabbed from the Empire page (I rotated it for effect). It reminds me of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, as he rides the A-Bomb down into Russia.