You know what you never hear anyone in the construction trade say? “Hammers are so hot right now,” or “screwdrivers are the new black,” or “I love this wrench! It’s so cool!” Yet so much of the computing industry is focused on which particular languages, platforms, and technologies are cool or hip. And, fifteen years after it emerged from Sun’s labs to wow the industry, Java is definitely in decline, at least by that metric.That’s pretty much the theme behind Dan Rosenberg’s jeremiad from last week, “Why doesn’t Sun really respect Java?” Though framed as a critique of Sun’s management of the language, much of his energy is reserved for how uncool Java has become. “There was a time when Java was the darling of the technology industry. It had everything going for it — technically advanced, relatively easy to use, and it held the magical promise of ‘write-once, run-anywhere.’ But, over the last two years or so … the language has become boring and moribund. Not that programming languages are such a thrill ride, but Java had a level of panache well beyond the norm. Somehow Java has become really boring. People don’t even argue about it anymore.”At a certain level, this is absurd. As Alex Papadimoulis points out on the invaluable Daily WTF, if you’re a working programmer the huge majority of the work you’ll be doing will be on applications that are by their nature incredibly boring. To a certain extreme rationalist mindset, there’s no point in caring about how exciting a language is — in fact, as Papadimoulis makes clear, trying to make your daily work exciting is often actively harmful to your code. And you’ll notice that you don’t really hear much about, say, the relative sexiness of C++. That’s because C++ isn’t a product put out by a publicly traded corporation trying to make money from it, so there’s no financial interest in making it cool. But the truth is that programmers are not robots, and are susceptible to choosing platforms because they’re cool and fun, just as they’re susceptible to choosing cars and soft drinks for the same reason. That’s why publishers promote books as making Java Web development fun again. It may be frustrating that this is something Sun has to do in order for Java to survive — but they do have to do it. Java