I’ve always been sort of fascinated by what the word “cool” could possibly mean when it comes to programmers and programming languages. After all, brief turn-of-the-millennium dot-com boomster fascination exception, computer programers as a class have largely managed to avoid being tarred as “cool” by society at large. Nevertheless, we never fully escape the social hierarchies established in high school, and thus even within the geeky subculture of computer pros certain structures of coolness emerge. Attempting to map these onto coolness markers in the larger culture (which may or may not still hold) result in spectacularly maladroit statements like “I would like to see people with piercings doing Java programming,” from Oracle’s Jeet Kaul. But if we can agree that a body of programmers with piercings and funny-colored hair doesn’t necessarily indicate a cool programming language, then what does? What can “cool” even mean when it comes to programming languages?The problem, I think, is that a lot of people just use “cool” as a synonym for “good,” when I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are elements of newness and buzz involved, and I think those are the sorts of things that will be very hard for Java to capture (or recapture, if you believe there was a late ’90s window when Java was cool). This doesn’t mean that Java isn’t a fine language, or that there isn’t gobs of money to be made from knowing about it!Neil McAllister has a somewhat cruel take on whether Java will be cool in his InfoWorld column. Here he focuses on one thing that prevents Java being as nimble as its newer competitors: the baggage, both syntactic and institutional, that it carries. For all that many Java observers hoped that an Oracle acquisition would shake up the landscape, he points out, Oracle is itself a fairly uncool company, and most of its efforts around the language have revolved around assuring everyone that there aren’t any radical changes in the works — surely not a move if we’re going for cool. Still, consider his conclusion: None of this “business as usual” talk suggests that Kaul’s pierced and tattooed developers will be flocking back to the Java platform anytime soon. In fact, now that it’s under Oracle’s wing, Java may settle even further into a niche as a tool much like the Oracle database itself: complex, cumbersome, often frustrating, and requiring lots of costly maintenance. There’s only one adjective about Oracle databases that he left off from that list: insanely profitable — for the company that makes them, for the experts employed to care for them, and, one imagines from their continuing market share, for the companies that own them. Java may not be cool, but perhaps, with Oracle’s help, the Java squares could still laugh all the way to the bank. Technology Industry