Lots of people have read Doc's analysis and expansion on Friedman's "flat" world theory. I only just got around to reading it this morning - it seems that the frequent short outages that Comcast is providing me (at no extra cost!) have some purpose after all. What struck me was a combination of Doc's post and a few conversations I've had at trade shows over the last few years.

It's worth reading the entire essay, but let me expand on a small piece of it:

Of course, the average and the dumb are still plentiful, no doubt about it. But try this concept on for size: most of them were made that way. They were shaped in large measure by school systems that have had, from the dawn of the industrial age, a main purpose: to produce employees for boxed positions in corporate org charts that take the shape of pyramids, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. The many supporting the few. We may have needed a caste system that made each of us a ranked product--and we still call ourselves that--of an education. There were few alternatives in the industrial age, aside from farming and other relatively solitary occupations. But there are plenty of alternatives now, as many as there are individuals with access to broadband.

What struck me about that? Well, a conversation I had at Ot2004 with Joshua Bloch, first off. I attended a talk he gave on designing good API's. I had a few issues with what he said at the time - I happen to think that things like "final" declarations on a class are not only limiting, but downright harmful. The fascinating thing was how he responded - he didn't disagree with me outright. What he did was state that developers exist in a pyramid, where the Lisp and Smalltalk guys (and Ruby and Python, et. al.) are at the top - developers using truly dynamic languages are, in his opinion, smart enough to deal with unlimited inheritance and polymorphism. The rest of the crowd? Java was designed with the lower two tiers of the pyramid in mind - the wide band of average and below average developers.

Got that? Read Doc's take on the whole pyramid scheme again, and then realize that Sun's decisions on what to do with Java are premised on the idea that most developers using it are idiots who are incapable of dealing with freedom, and simply have to be protected from themselves. At OOPSLA a couple of years ago I got the same explanation from Hjelsberg when I asked him about "final" in C# - again, his take is that most of you just aren't bright enough to handle Smalltalk, or Lisp, or Python, or Ruby (etc) - you need to be protected from yourself.

Reminds me of a line from "A Few Good Men" -

The truth? You can't handle the truth!

That's what Sun and Microsoft are telling you with Java and the CLR based languages. You can't handle power or responsibility - it all has to be bottled up and granted to you in small doses, because you just aren't smart enough to deal with the whole thing. From their standpoint, you live at the bottom of the pyramid, and they've provided tools that are guaranteed to keep you there. They know what power looks like - they just don't think you can handle it.