James Gosling at a Sun conference - narrowly correct but broadly missing the point :
'There have been a number of language coming up lately,' noted James Gosling today at Sun's World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City when asked if Java was in any kind of danger from the newcomers. 'PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,' he continued, 'but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.'
As a language, PHP and Ruby may not have the breadth of Java on a single machine - after all, they just 'generate' web pages. Well, they do a little more than that I suppose, they can handle incoming Web requests too. And what applications can you build and at what scale if all you can do is process messages over a network? I suppose the breadth of the applications possible is the same as the breadth of the network your messages travel over - which in this case is global. Maybe someone should tell him that 'the network is the computer'.
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