Meetings are fine if they have an agenda, someone to enforce the agenda, no extraneous parties, are timeboxed and have a predetermined outcome should no consensus be arrived at. "We're going to shelve this unless we can come up with an acceptable solution within 30 minutes"
What others have said. Good code is self commenting. I prefer to see comments reserved for instances where its not clearly obvious why a piece of code exists (hacky workarounds, etc...)
So, kind of playing devil's advocate here, but what do paying with a credit card, adjusting your 401K, using an insurance card at the dentist, shopping for the best car insurance and transferring money between banks have in common? People can lose money if the system fails or is simply not reliable. What do going to the emergency room, a BNSF train pulling a Union Pacific coal car and filling a prescription have in common? People can die if the system fails or is simply not reliable.
These industries and the activities listed have an inherent level of risk associated with them. The existing systems work well enough that we take the safety of these activities for granted. So while as an engineer, I might hate working with old, outdated technology and not want to work in these industries, as a consumer I appreciate that the people governing these industries are perhaps overly cautious.
My problem with java is not the language itself. It is the bloated, over-engineered frameworks that were built on top of it that way too many companies bought into. See EJB2, JSF, etc... Way too many java frameworks make the job at hand harder.
A huge smell to me is that java frameworks have... frameworks... which have frameworks to finally arrive at a frankenstein's monster that is semi usable until its not and then woe-be-the-engineer saddled with its architecture. JSF is by itself is unproductive to develop with, so frameworks like RichFaces rose on top of it, which were also not enough, so other frameworks like Seam rose on top of them. And one feature of Seam is to make the JSF event-based framework behave more like an action-based framework ala struts or spring MVC. Maybe this should beg the question, "WTF are we doing with this dubiously helpful technology (JSF) at the foundation of our (web) technology stack?"
Its interesting to me that many "new" languages getting implemented are built on the JVM (or are old languages ported to java). I expect the JVM will outlive Java by a long margin.
