[grey_whiskers]

If God had coded in Java, we'd all still be trilobites. REAL Gods reuse their classes in C++.

All, right, lay off already.
So McNealy's an egotist.

I had to work in the Darwin awards with garbage collection, somehow. ;-)

Full Disclosure: Fortran Forever! and vi too!

Hey, they don't call me 'Grey Whiskers' for nothing.

[FredZarguna]

Hey, I've made as much money writing code in FORTRAN and COBOL as anybody (still) alive. FORTRAN got a bad rap it really didn't deserve (COBOL's however, is). Late seventies I used to say, C is just FORTRAN the way it should have been written in the first place. My disdain for Java has nothing to do with McNealy. Find a major software luminary who isn't a egotist if you can.

Carrying your metaphor, isn't Java really the language of creationists? After all, its objects are destroyed, not by well known deterministic mechanisms, but by mysterious forces over which you have no control. Garbage collection is like The Flood: all at once, somebody outside the program notices bad things piling up and decides to get rid of them in one fell swoop, and depending on the vagaries of time slicing, some may still survive.

Can't seem to work a serpent in there, though... or a pillar of salt... or a burning bush... though many is the late night coding I've felt I was wandering in the wasteland for about 40 years.