They put a new employee in the cubicle across from me today. Eager and bright-eyed with the promise of continuing employment, he immediately set about interrupting me.

One of his first questions caught me off guard. He sidled up to me and asking in a quiet, almost conspiratorial tone,

"Is anyone here using Linux?"

My first impulse was to reply, "Only the people who don't need to get anything done." But the question triggered a flashback. Indeed, it was only a few years ago I had been a new employee and asked the exact same question.

So I calmed my experience-taught instinctive dismissal of all fruits borne by the Stallman tree. Instead, I gave an honest answer.

And the honest answer was simple: A few people use it for small test and development projects. My young inquisitor was disappointed to learn that absolutely no one uses it as a primary desktop. For starters, our email/scheduling application is the core of our communication and there is no Linux client available. Beyond that, we face a daily deluge of Windows-friendly document formats -- Word, Excel, etc. Yes, I know some fropen sourcery products can do the conversion, but who really has time to mess with that?

The look on his face told me a small part of his new-career fantasy had just died. He undoubtedly came in expecting to do grand things with zero-cost software. Instead, a golfball-sized piece of reality had just dented the hood of his Electric Linux car. I knew exactly how he felt. I had been there before myself.

Turning back to my goal of actually getting something to run today, I found myself face-to-face with the other broken promise of my career.

Java.

No, not the write-once-run-anywhere thing. I'm talking about the whole easier-enterprise-development thing.

To be fair, it's not the fault of Java per se. It's the fault of the vendors making Java development tools. I have difficulty finding the words to precisely crystalize my opinion of the Java tools currently available.

However, "suck" comes pretty close.

Look, folks. This language has been public for almost a decade. Am I to believe in 7 years not one single decent, intuitive, stable IDE could be developed?

Oh, wait. One was developed. Sun sued the crap out of its maker.

How helpful.