This past week at JavaOne in San Francisco was very interesting. If you did as I did and went by the topics listed in the Session Catalog, you would have seen that Ajax and Web 2.0 were amongst the hot topics. If you then went to most of the Ajax and Web 2.0 sessions, as I did, you would have been
very dissappointed.
Why are so many other
Java developers so very anti JavaScript? No, it is not type checked. So what? Many of these same people
love Ruby! One session's presenters went so far as to claim that there were no debuggers for JavaScript (ever heard of Venkman?) and no
IDE editors (there is at least on Eclipse JavaScript smart editor plugin).
Many presenters were also quite happy to show sample HTML and then happily display, even brag about, their near total ignorance of HTML.
My only logical conclusion from all of this is a massive case of
ego and arrogance.
I have been a software developer for over 30 years. When I started a "debugger" was a person, not a program. Your editor was an IBM 029 keypunch machine. Your "advanced" language was FORTRAN IV.
None of our tools are perfect. JavaScript is not perfect.
Java is not perfect (
blasphemy!). And a web developer who feels he/she is "above" knowing HTML, CSS, XSLT, JavaScript and so on is neither a complete developer, nor a very good one.
Just my $0.02