Last year, at a going-away party for a friend who was a member of the ANSI Language Committee, I found out about something very odd. Somehow Sun Microsystems had convinced a majority of the committee to approve Java as a standard language, yet allow Sun to continue to be its sole proprietor and designer. This is the first time in the history of computing that this has happened. Previously any language that was approved as a standard was then maintained and modified only by the majority of the ANSI Committee for that language. In the last year I watched and read about Java implementation projects.
Exception handling is left to higher layers, causing major flaws to be overlooked.
Debugging of errant Java processes or threads is a nightmare. Most financial institutions and many other large corporations now block Java protocols at their firewall or have strict policies forbidding use of Java-enabled browsers. Over-objectification transforms simple tasks into complex ones to fit into the object computing model. With a staff of 14,000 software engineers, Microsoft can spin protocols and publish them faster than most organizations can write prototypes. I realized immediately that I had seen this before at Digital, where I worked for 18 years.