James Gosling, father of the Java programming language, thinks Ruby is just for generating web pages.

He’s wrong of course, but you already knew that.

What’s notable here isn’t that he’s wrong and we need to defend Ruby from his ignorance. What’s notable is that the guy who’s supposed to be carrying Java forward is completely clueless about the real competition. My guess is that he completely understands the challenges C# brings. It’s easy to understand. It’s just like Java.

If this is who Sun has driving their language and platform strategy, Java may not be the conservative choice of programming technology (for long) that you might believe it to be.

IBM thought PCs were silly in the early 80s. Not a threat. Not where the market is. Not big. Not scalable.

Oops.