Josh Bloch has always been my favorite deity in the Java pantheon. He's never said or written anything that I didn't find shockingly reasonable. He's one of the few folks willing to get up and talk in pragmatic terms about the importance of good API design. He believes the compiler is his friend. He wants to help the compiler be your friend as well.

And to top it all off, he admits mistakes. At this year's 'puzzlers' quiz at JavaOne last week, he paused to offer everyone a big mea culpa for a design decision he made which later turned out to be wrong.*

How often do you see a THOUGHT LEADER do that? And in front of thousands of people, no less? I'm a fan for life.

* The mistake was that java.util.Arrays.asList() was updated to take varargs. This means it's now ok to pass an array of primitives to asList, but you will get a (perhaps) astonishing result: a List containing a single entry (your array of primitives).

Spent last week at JavaOne, spending some time now to blog a couple quick thoughts about it.

• Overall, and as reported elsewhere, the energy level was quite a bit higher than in recent years. Attendance was quite good.
• I saw an inordinate number of 'Java couples' strolling about with matching orange backpacks. About 30 by my count. Was this just me? Male & female checking out the latest on NetBeans and Ajax hand-in-hand or in an otherwise not very we're-just-co-workers kind of way.
• Crowd control for the sessions sucked even worse than usual.
• I guess scripting language support is the next big thing. Seems useful, but only to a point. The only use case I buy is to make it easier to provide applications with end-user scriptability. But now they're talking about VB. They're talking about inline XML. I am a little afraid.
• Ajax was all the rage. This still just gets a big WTF from me.

If I were to hazard a guess as to W exactly that last F is, I would say this: Java is done. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in the sense of all the big mountains having been climbed in J(2?)[S|E]E

They've finally cleaned up most all of the crap out of the language. They've cleaned the crap out of the persistence APIs. Actually, most all of the EE frameworks seem to be in pretty good shape now. We're finally starting to get mature development tools. Even Swing is becoming a viable way to write desktop applications.

The fact that a crock of hype like Ajax can be the hot thing at JavaOne speaks volumes to how far Java has come. The sense I get is that there just isn't that much to do to the Java platform. Maybe we don't need the JCP anymore, not because it's too slow, but because it's going to run out of useful work to do?

Kevin Kelly had the cover story in the Times Magazine this week, and it has my hackles up a bit.

Basically, Scan This Book! is 10 pages of blatherings about how search engines will soon allow us to create a vast interconnected stores of all human knowledge ever created. Blah blah blah.

Two big problems:

One. This is just a bit too Wired Magazine crica 1996 for me. I'm having bad flashbacks.

Two. Much of his argument rests on a clumsy sleight of hand that we just can't give him a pass on. The key paragraph is here:

A text, a melody, a picture or a story succeeds best if it is connected to as many ideas and other works as possible. Ideally, over time a work becomes so entangled in a culture that it appears to be inseparable from it, in the way that the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, "Cinderella" and the Mona Lisa are inseparable from ours. This tendency for creative ideas to infiltrate other works is great news for culture. In fact, this commingling of creations is culture.

Now, I understand that it would be very convenient for this to be true if I were writing a technophillic puff piece for Wired, er, the NYT Magazine. But I'm sorry, it simply is not true. And I won't even bother to point out the fact that none of the works he even cites have any footnotes.

We consider cultural works to be 'great' precisely to the extent that they can dissolve those linkages. This is what we mean when we say they are timeless - that they don't need to carry the baggage of all those links across the decades and centuries in order for them to have meaning to us now.

All those linkages in Google will give lit-film-art-history majors something to argue about but most of us just want to read a book. At the beach. Without batteries. Google isn't going to change that. Mark my words.

More feelgood uselessness from the whitehouse today about getting tough with ID thieves. A task force, hooboy. Goes perfectly with that wonderfully useless legislation we got a couple of years back.

And still not a peep about anything that will actually solve the problem, namely: getting tough with the bastards who are so careless with our information in the first place.

Banks and insurance companies will continue to shift the cost of this problem onto consumers for as long as they can. If these repsponses from the federal government are any indication, it looks like it's going to continue for quite a while longer.

Hint: if you are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, GET A SECURITY FREEZE ON YOUR CREDIT REPORT. DO IT NOW. It's not a perfect option, but you have to protect yourself somehow. Your financial institutions WANT TO KEEP YOU EXPOSED to ID theft - it's simply too profitable for them to have it be otherwise. And they evidently have successfully lobbied your federal representatives to keep it that way.

Some things last a long time. Like spelling mistakes. Chiseled in concrete.

Money, sex(?), fame, and power. Only one fatguy can have it all. But are any of them really happy?