James Turner is, among other things, the senior editor of LinuxWorld magazine and a committer to the Apache Jakarta Struts project. He has also published two books relating to Java and has five years experience with the language.

Which makes it all the more refreshing that he can see the problem in the Java community so clearly:

Java is a great language being destroyed by Rampaging Computer Science

He summs up this viewpoint article with:

The long and the short of it is that, in my opinion, Java is a great language being destroyed by Rampaging Computer Science. There's a time for elegance, and a time for usability. If developers want to make the internals of packages flexible and extensible, that's all well and good. But the external interfaces should be clean, simple to use, and have wrappers for the most commonly accessed functionality. For example, in a PGP package, I should be able to encrypt or decrypt a file in 5 lines of code or less. After all, I can do it in Perl in 3.

Shh. Don't anyone tell Larry Wall - he'll prove that Perl can do it in two.