I'm the author of the original article. What about bloat? It's hard to compare java to C applications because people don't tend to write the exact same app in more than one language, but compare Azurus to utorrent. Sure, Azurus has many more bells and whistles than utorrent does, but are you willing sacrifice an entire machine's CPU/memory to a single app just to get some special features? I doubt it. utorrent is the most popular torrent client because of this very fact. If Azurus weren't just a resource hog, it would be the most popular because of its features, but it isn't. People don't need a million features. They want an app that runs quickly and efficiently and gets the job done. The same thing with web app development. Just because you work for a company with a huge budget doesn't mean that you should squander the company's money on hardware when it could be done with less. If your whole programming department thinks that hardware is cheap, then before you know it you've got 500+ machines to run a simple website. We're no longer talking pennies here. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars monthly. That would hire a whole staff of C programmers. There exist many C libraries that provide the same functionality that java provides. You guys should just bite the bullet, commit yourselves to doing a little manual memory management, drag out your favorite debugger and try writing you next app in C or C++. I'd bet that you'd be very surprised at how very do-able, writing a current-day app in C or C++ actually is compared to java. Come on, where are my fellow C programming brethren? I know you're out there! Take a break from your desktop app coding and back me up on this! :)