I remember in 1996 feeling smug about how I was on the leading edge of programming with Java while Neanderthals chased after memory leaks and COBOL programmers were fixing Y2K issues. It was good to be king, but now I see Ruby whipper-snappers running circles around me and I feel like a hall monitor telling them to slow down.

Well, sort of. I've dabbled in Ruby and think it is great system but it will take a while before it can hold a candle to the dearth of third-party APIs available for Java. In this way Java has become something of a legacy system, but legacies (like COBOL, C and Java) are built because they work.

In 10 years the Ruby folks will feel like hall monitors when web 7.0 is developed.