Dalton Filho

In our pursuit to become better professionals, it is common to get stuck in the multitude of choices in which to invest our time and energy. In the “My Job Went To India” book, Fowler describes how a mentor helped him by narrowing down the list of infinite choices to a set of just three, hence the “find a mentor” recommendation. As for myself, I have looked for mentors plenty of times, just to end up with lists of things to learn that were more biased than helpful. What struck me is the fact that most of these things were really important, and could improve my skills in some way (though some would require a mental leap to imagine how). What was then my objection to those recommendations?

The results are in: Java has hit the top of mind on Google’s Zeitgeist 2007, scoring the 8th position on the “what …” list. But… “what?” Exactly. If even the average Joe is wondering what is Java, I don’t see how that can be a good thing. What these results tell me is not that there is a burst of new developers willing to learn Java, or that the language is so utterly good that even non-technical people are curious. Google’s Zeitgeist will probably never feature wxWidgets or C++, because they’re just invisible to the end user. You don’t see a wxWidgets logo when a wxWidgets application is loading, nor do you ask a user to update his libc. I would rather hear “I don’t know what is Java” than to hear “Oh, I know. It is that thing that was bugging me!” Java needs better integration with browsers and OSes. Java should be invisible to the end-user.