From Stephen Colebourne’s Weblog:

[Bill Joy] was often comparing Oak to more complicated and elegant languages like Python and Beta. He would often go on at length about how great Oak would be if he could only add closures and continuations and parameterized type.

What’s funny is that I’m still working on Java 1.4.2 and I really want generics — whether they are broken or not.

Java is this generation’s Cobol — it’s never really going to go away.  And, as sick of Java as we are, there has yet to be a good alternative that will please the suits (i.e. the guys who pay us programmers).  There are a lot of candidates, but nothing now that can replace J2EE.  And that’s too bad . . .