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.