If you’re worked up over the post-merger future of the Java platform, you owe it to yourself to read Peter Wayner’s longish piece on this very Web site! It is quite soothing, and you can imagine it being read aloud in the calm, ration voice of a public radio announcer. The thesis goes something like this: Java could be wrecked by Oracle heavy-handedness driving wedges between it and other big companies with big Java stakes, and it could be supplanted by other, hotter and noisier, languages. But it probably won’t, because of inertia! Well, OK, “inertia” sounds bad; let’s say because of a huge pool of happy Java developers, and a huge number of installed JVMs, which are really doing just fine for most things people use them for. I quibble with some of his details — I particularly doubt that even the biggest, most lumbering company would pay “$100, $200, or even $1 million per CPU to avoid recoding their Java EE applications” — but in general I think he’s right: Java is here to stay because you can’t just turn it off, and if it gets screwed up everyone would suffer.This is not exactly the stuff of enthusiasm building! I got my very first real job in 1999 as a copy editor for the group that was putting JavaWorld out in those days, and the technology had buzz then — certainly more than some of our other publications, like SunWorld (which focused on Solaris) and Windows TechEdge (which was for NT admins, whee!). Java was innovative, weird, and was going to take over the world, maybe. Now it’s everywhere, like everyone dreamed. If there are no more worlds left to conquer, well, it’s big enough that it won’t go away any time soon, either.And who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? The much-desired advent of closures in Java 7 may be on the horizon! So, despite the grumpiness that often comes to the fore in this blog, I do believe that Java has a steady future, that may even feature some excitement now and then. Java