That's what all PHB's want.

Programming that is simple enough they can understand and staff for. Programming that is simple enough that they can hire anyone/anywhere to do it.
Simple enough that they can train their their mistress in a few months to do it, or at least pretend to do it (yes, this happened to me at a prior job).

PHB's want programming that solves complicated problems with a very simple solution. That makes them look good, get promoted, make their quota, and get their bonuses.

That's why they engage lots of salespeople. These people are supposed to make up for their lack of management/development skills by finding some vendor to provide them (and the company) with a miracle technology to solve all their problems. And, the salespeople usually buy them lunch (and a whole lot more).

They want silver bullets. Right now, XML is a silver bullet.

I guess that's my problem. I hate PHB's enough to not want to become one. Yet, as I get older, I realize that I no longer have the stamina to work all night, or for 72 hours straight to solve problems. I'm getting tired of everyone's emergency costing me a weekend (or vacation) with my family.

I still code/solve them faster than most young-en's I know, with much better quality and tighter design.

But I'm getting tired of silver bullets. And the sad thing about most silver bullets is that once you build something relatively complicated with it, the problem set is usually as/more difficult than doing it in the last silver bullet technology.

But I continue to learn the silver bullet languages, simply because I want to keep working.

I coded and tested 4 C++ classes on Friday (2 were linked lists) in about 4 hours. I did a little more testing tonight, but basically, what I had worked. I did XP and wrote a test program to build the lists inside the lists to make sure it worked.

I'm tired of the PHB's running things. I want smart people to run things.

Some of them are what I call "sold out".

What I mean by that is that they are chasing that the money-holders want simply because they need a check. It happens frequently in tough times.

Tough times are a refining fire that test what you really believe. Watch people during these times, because you find out what they're really made of. People who don't believe in a particular language strongly will "sell out" to the new thing, even if it violates their prior strongly held beliefs.

Now, I'll admit that I switch languages, because I don't worship a particular language. But, I'm not claiming to be an expert in C++ or Java, either (like Bruce Eckel). I use them as tools to do work. I bitch about what doesn't work in them, and try to propose better alternatives, when given the chance.

I'll probably take a look at Squeak, when I have time. Because, from an OO perspective, I think SmallTalk makes sense, especially now that interpreted environments are taking over from "compiled" executables.

I think Java was the key language to make it over the hump, from compiled to interpreted. Our "new technology" group looked at Smalltalk in the early 1990's and machines were simply not powerful enough, then, to use an interpreted language. That, and many of the powerful algorithms were probably not built into the language at the time.

I'll be honest, I think that Oracle and IBM give Java a bad name, still, because of the bloated products they have put out using Java. But, I think it's more because of programming by committee, than because Java is a bad language. I'll admit I haven't gone very deep into Java Swing classes, and from what I have done, they seem difficult and clunky to me. For GUI programming, there probably is a better way.

However, I worked on Java multi-threaded server application for a pharmacy claims company. The tools for writing good threaded/sockets code which parsed messages were definitely there. And I think with the addition of Jython and the use of the SAX/DOM, and some of the parsing infrastructure that is there, Java could become the lingua franca of the transaction processing industry.