Dear Scott McNealy:
I am writing this letter in the name of 10 million programmers looking for a new home. We are called the occupational programmers.
We have been betrayed and abandoned by your worst enemy, and this is the right time to take on this noble endeavour and capitalize on their mistake. They wont be producing another 'basic' language for the next 5 or 10 years so you have the great advantage of time on your side.
The world already knows the power and beauty of Java, but hobbyists and novices fear its complexity.
We don't care about generics, we give a fuck about garbage collection, boxing/unboxing, casting, regular expressions, reflection, interfaces, no no no, all we want is a simple language to create our toy-apps, keep our list of customers, music collection, and maybe an invoice or purchase order when we (if we) master the complex world of programming.
We are students, young entrepreneurs, small business owners, public accountants, teachers, and casual web developers. We are the majority. We are no experts but we do count.
What we are asking for is the creation of a new language like visual basic, making it java's younger brother, not to compete against it, but to complete one family under one Sun. To introduce us to the new world of linux.
With a simple IDE where the most important feature is 'drag and drop'. Remember that we don't code complex algorithms, components or device drivers. We don't care about assemblies or low level functions. Make it easy for us. Make it intuitive. Make it fun.
See what they have done to our beloved java, making a vulgar copy by changing some words and now they call it a 'new' language.
Well, it is payback time. It is your turn to copy VB, change some words here and there and make 'your' general purpose language for the mere mortal.
Remove useless verbosity like 'Dim', making it dynamic like old VB6, making it forgiving. We will not code the new web browser or operating system, therefore we will be allowed to make mistakes. Let the scientists and professionals use java and code the world.
And take note here, there is nothing we lazy coders hate more than strong typing. Forget about that stupid approach. We are weak, dynamic and loosely coupled programmers.
Make it like javascript without the curlies, add some elegance from python and ruby, but let me emphasize here, 'NO CURLIES'. Remember laziness, like VB6 but better and simpler, That is not much we are asking for, are we?
They can not go back to the old glory days of VB, they are fucked up by their wrong decisions and now they are losing 10 millions of us.
We are looking for a new home.
Yours sincerely,
An occupational programmer.