Doctor Who and Java Idiosyncrasies

As I was watching an episode of Doctor Who this evening, it struck me how well Christopher Eccleston captures the sadness and rage of an entity who has seen the very planet that bore him obliterated in front of his eyes, leaving him as a witness.

I think that the finite nature of existence is something that I don't pay enough attention to. There is no such thing as measureless wealth or boundless energy or total happiness or eternal damnation. There are just moments. Finite moments. And one day I will die and one day the ice caps will melt and one day the earth will burn up in the sun.

The universe will keep on ticking away like nothing ever happened, because from far enough away, even the human race looks like a speck on the horizon. This is not to sound depressing, but rather to point out that I probably shouldn't take the continuation of our society or our planet for granted.

Also, I just don't like Java, and a lot of the problems that I have with it come from working with C#, which had the advantage of being able to address Java's many shortcomings. Checked exceptions by default and Java's atrocious use of the protected keyword are a few that come to mind immediately. In fact, everything that I like about Java has nothing to do with the language itself, but rather with the Eclipse development environment and the power of the open source community behind it.

I just wish they would all start using C#.