In the beginning, I didn't appreciate Java. As most programmers, I had trouble getting used to the Object Oriented style of programming. But in time, I came to appreciate it, and now I think it's a wonderful language.

The Diamond Crew is working very hard to get decent performance out of Java. See the 'Optimizing in higher programming languages' essay for some of our fast techniques. We discovered that Java can be very quick, and only some hardware-access is slow. The ImageOutputStream for example is very fast, and can take on native routines. But the graphics on the other hand, are not too fast. So we developed our own routines, and created AnimatedApplet, of which a beta version is released. And, if you're using a special native DLL, AnimatedApplet can give Java about 70% of C++ performance. So if your code is fast, you can even beat commercial software in Java.

Recently, IBM released a Java-to-Win32 compiler, which means that you can write 'real' Windows 95/98 or NT applications. In the new Visual Cafe 2.0 series from Symantec, this function is also available, but from my own benchmarks, the JVM versions are faster than the native-code versions of the applications.