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JavaKilledOOPSLA

OOPSLA is a victim of its own success. The goal was

to promote object-oriented programming so that lots of people

would use it. C++ didn't quite get there (I won't go into

the reasons why), but another has: with the widespread adoption of the Java programming language,

we can unequivocally say that ObjectsHaveSucceeded,

a position I defended in a debate with rpg

at OOPSLA 2002.

Thus in this sense, at least, OOPSLA has achieved its goal.

Now the excitement of practitioners is focused on Java (C# has

not yet displaced it), and there are lots of conferences,

such as !JavaOne, that address their specific pragmatic needs and

interests, so they have abandoned OOPSLA to the theoreticians and the vendors of non-Java products. -GuySteele

There is some truth in this. So, the program committee should discourage papers on Java because the people who want them go somewhere else, and

because there are plenty of other places to publish them. -RalphJohnson

The following e-mail was forwarded to me from someone who went to ECOOP last week. I don't know the original author.

I was the tall guy without voice that spoke to you a few days ago in

Oslo. [...] But, alas, walking around in Oslo the (very cold) day

before left me impaired.

I hope am in better shape next time we meet; which believe will not be

on ECOOP. Almost all talks I attended went like this: "We would like

to do X. But this isn't possible in Java. So we have this project to

change Java....". The proverb goes: "If you have a hammer, all

problems looks like nails", and never have I seen this smore true than

at ECOOP; some of the constructed problemes were simply lame. When it

became evident yesterday that I had to return to Troms today to

attent to local problems, I was not devestated."