Alas, in my three decades in this biz, nothing “rules the world.”   Although it may well be human nature that drives every new language to proclaim that it just did so.   The Lone Ranger rides his horse through the radio waves to the entertainment of all, but in real life there ain’t no silver bullet.   Sux...

I daresay that, during the course of any given work week, most of us switch routinely from one language to another, including Java “of course,” and that we are most-often dealing with systems that involve more than one language and/or type of computer system at a time.   (Therefore, a “Perl” community most emphatically is not a “Perl-only” community.)

Java is a fine tool.   If it could seriously have standardized on just one pseudo-machine implementation (as seen by the language, that is), it might well be a better one.   Ruby is a fine tool.   LISP is ... The First One.

Nevertheless:   the moment the word, “versus,” enters into speech about computer programming languages, I do think that a key point has just been missed.   Computer programming tools (of all sorts ...) fundamentally co-exist.   Wholesale replacement of any technology is never a viable option; nor is it (almost) ever justifiable to the business.   Every technology that, all(!!) things considered, offers a pragmatic benefit will always be considered, but the total decision is never cut-and-dry and ought never be judged as being such.   This practical observation obviates much religious fervor.

(Heh.   Did I just say that this entire thread is pointless?   Oops.   Me bad.   Have fun.)

Maybe I should have put "rules the world" in quotes.

the "importance of" the language does not lie in the language itself: it lies in what has already been written and thoroughly debugged in it.
Also significant to me is how easily and how successfully you can integrate what they did with what you did. The way to get anywhere is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yes. And Java has much bigger giants than pretty much any other language. So by this metric, it is more "important".

When it comes to marketing ... yeah, them are giants indeed.

When it comes to the language, the giants that they decided to stand on were aging already when the first version of Java was designed and they failed to add much later on. C#, that once was "our own Java" from Microsoft, has evolved quite a bit more and has spread its weight over quite a few more giants.

When it comes to libraries ... well, yes, there are companies that believe they are big and important enough to be allowed to continually screw their customers and force everyone to use the only programming language the CEO had ever heard of. (Good bye, Adobe, fare well ... in the direction of Unisys. And hope you've accumulated enough patents and have enough lawyers.) Apart from a few such interfaces to proprietary systems, what are the libraries you speak of?

Java has wasted billions of dollars on marketing and billions of person-hours on development in a bad language. Though on the other hand we should not forget that it allowed a lot of people to get a "software developer" job.

Jenda
Enoch was right!
Enjoy the last years of Rome.