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Yes, lots of people care. Just because it's not trendy to program in java and it doesn't get as much hype as ruby/python/etc, doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
I agree. It's irritating how idiotic people get with languages. They go from "This is the bees knees! It can be used anywhere! It's the best thing since sliced bread", to "This is irrelevant now we have our new fad favourite language"

Why can't a language just be good at some things, and not others? Do we need a grand unifying language that is great for everything?

If you want a reliable, scalable, bullet proof backend, java is still pretty hard to beat.

I thing Java took a wrong turn with 1.5 and especially 1.6. Introduced new complexities to the language, without adressing its main drawbacks: verbosity, and lack of proper closures, and functions being first class citizens
Java 7 should add closures. And in the mean time, most of the times you would be using closures, you can use anonymous inner classes.
anon. inner classes are simply too heavy to warrant most uses. You want brevity.
Yeah, closures and anonymous inner classes would really redeem Java in the eyes of the masses.

Java is going, going, ...

i think what tomjen was referencing was that java already has anonymous inner classes.
I'm aware. I was trying to take a funny jab at Java and it didn't turn out so well.
Could anyone elaborate on which sections of code weren't open sourced originally? That'd be interesting to hear.
In the Sun release in May of last year, it was something like 4-5% of the code and most of it had to do with graphics stuff: font & image rasterizing, etc. which makes sense. I think that's why most of the developers didn't care much one way or the other.
I've been moving from doing most of my server side work in PHP to doing as much as I can in Rhino. I'd have been more anxious about doing that if there hadn't been a clear path to openness for Java, and I'm glad to see it get there.
I don't make or distribute java much these days but the fact that it's open-sourced means that java developers can start to expect most desktops to have it.

And only after what... 14 years? Good going Sun.

Not sure I follow you. Most desktops are some flavor of Windows, call it +90%. What piece of technology, not present previously, became ubiquitous on Windows once it was open sourced? Open sourcing java doesn't mean much for end users on the desktop, imo.

The commercial open sourcing of java will matter on the ecosystem and it's a good thing for java developers (which, despite HN demographics, there are still millions of). Particularly, when you consider the flaws of the JCP and Sun's control to this point.

Good going Sun indeed--stick to making awesome hardware.

Now that it's absolutely trivial to distribute, developers can count on the same code base everywhere. Kind of like how everyone can count on GCC.

I don't write much Java now but at one time I supported a database library on runtimes from sun, ibm, apple, microsoft and the blackdown guys. It was crazy. Java and Python have been around for about the same amount of time. Python has about 5 different VM implementations. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines Java has 10 times that number.