> You don't see a lot of twentysomethings ... thinking there's a lot of opportunity there to make their mark
This is a too-common syndrome, and not just with respect to the JVM. Some people are genuinely in love with anything new. Some people just get bored easily. Those might not be the best motivations, but they're not the worst. The worst is the people who jump all over a new language or technology because they know peers are unfamiliar with it. They're insecure. They're not confident in their ability to master the standards and best practices that are already established for an older technology, so they try to get in first on a new technology where those things haven't evolved yet. No rules to violate. Then their arrogance as kings of the new hill, combined with their obvious cluelessness about the broader context, puts everyone off what might have been a true advance in the state of the art. That's the worst.
This is way more common than you'd think. There's a guy on my project, who works around the edges in Go because he can't handle the C that most of the code is written in. I've felt tempted to do similar things myself, writing some bit of code in Lua or something just so others won't be able to review what I've done and say it's wrong. I resisted. Too many don't.
This is a too-common syndrome, and not just with respect to the JVM. Some people are genuinely in love with anything new. Some people just get bored easily. Those might not be the best motivations, but they're not the worst. The worst is the people who jump all over a new language or technology because they know peers are unfamiliar with it. They're insecure. They're not confident in their ability to master the standards and best practices that are already established for an older technology, so they try to get in first on a new technology where those things haven't evolved yet. No rules to violate. Then their arrogance as kings of the new hill, combined with their obvious cluelessness about the broader context, puts everyone off what might have been a true advance in the state of the art. That's the worst.
This is way more common than you'd think. There's a guy on my project, who works around the edges in Go because he can't handle the C that most of the code is written in. I've felt tempted to do similar things myself, writing some bit of code in Lua or something just so others won't be able to review what I've done and say it's wrong. I resisted. Too many don't.