HOW ironic it was that Iran's President Muhammad Khatami welcomed Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, on the prince's surprise visit to Tehran on Monday February 9th. While Charles will one day be the largely powerless figurehead of a parliamentary democracy that pretends to be a monarchy, events of recent days have shown his host to be the largely powerless figurehead of a pretend parliamentary democracy that is in fact a theocracy.

That the reformist party has called off it's boycott isn't going to help keep the pressure on the ruling clerics either. Although that may be just good pragmatism, as it seems not even the Ayatollah Khomeini can pressure the upper house (not it's real name!) into re-instating the 2500 reformist candidates. Even if so, it is dangerous pragmatism. As The Economist says:

The danger now is that just enough of the "vetted" reformist candidates stand to allow the clerics to claim that there was a proper election, while voter apathy and a dearth of liberal candidates ensure a shoo-in for hardline candidates.

It seems that I am in good company, with one of the Grandfathers of database-backed websites, Philip Greenspun, writing this article comparing Java with an SUV. Unwieldy for 90% of tasks, and not actually appropriate for that last 5% of tasks that require something more powerful or specialised.

So why is it being rammed down the throat of the development community?

This Advogato thread suggests that it is not ignominious for a language to quietly die. Eiffel, Algol and Pascal are languages that have died honoroubly - maintaining a small niche where they are appropriate and appreciated. Java is no longer operating in the niche that the original designers intended, and it survived in it's early stages only because of Sun's muscle and the feeling that it was a way to avoid Microsoft. Of course you can avoid Microsoft with many other equally as portable and much better languages.