Welcome to my new column. It’s basically a grep of all mentions of java in #php from July to December 2005. The nicks have not been hidden to protect the guilty. This is what the people in #php on ef-net think about Java as a programming language: < Johnboyo> java is awful, im a symbian programmer by trade and i avoid it at all costs < @feti> better than a low-level language.

Most of the time I’m pretty proud to call myself a Java programmer. When people ask me what programming language I work with, I usually answer Java even though I’ve probably been doing more PHP5 than Java lately. But every now and then I get a question from a client asking where he or she should download the latest version of the Java runtime. I wish I could offer them something else than java.