Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web

As I just wrote in a review for DevX: JetBrains is very smart to give a short term price promotion for the update because they are their own best competitor: I found IntelliJ 4.5 just about perfect, so without the deep discount (until the end of August) I probably would not have bought the upgrade. For me, the nicest improvements are in Javascript editor support.

There are better programming languages than Java (pick a dynamic language: Common Lisp, Ruby, Smalltalk, Python Scheme, etc.) but there are three things that keep me focused on Java:

• The quality of IDEs like IntelliJ, Eclipse, and NetBeans
• The great (and free!) infrastructure software for web portals (Tomcat, JBoss, etc.)
• Most of my customers insist that I use Java