Is Java a lingua franca or a lure?

Alas, CodeMash is over for 2009, with its constituent factions (Java developers, .NET types, scripters, etc.) going their separate ways after meeting up and attending each others' sessions. One interesting example from late Friday was a session on reverse-engineering code. Presented mostly from a Microsoft world-view, it was interesting seeing that decompilers on that platform can convert from managed bytecode back to any of the various languages that create it. One tool (I don't recall its name... sorry, I just won't commit LTM neurons to anything on Windows) had a source code viewer with a pop-up menu that allowed you to switch between C++, C#, Visual Basic, and even Delphi as decompiled languages. I had to duck out to take a call just as the presenter was switching gears to Java decompilers (JAD and friends), and wondered if, with the rise of scripting languages on the JVM, we might see an equivalent capability to decompile Java bytecode back not only to Java, but Groovy, JRuby, Jython, Scala, and the various other languages we enjoy working with on the JVM.

One other Java note was the degree to which Java was cited by people who don't necessarily use it. It's common at this point to hear another language's feature described in terms of a Java equivalent: "Objective-C protocols are kind of like Java interfaces", "the .NET CLR is pretty much the same thing as the JVM", etc. Surely it speaks to the ubiquity of Java that you can assume most members of a crowd will get what you're talking about with such an analogy.

But there was also an element of Java being used as a lure. An interesting case of this could be found at Amazon's recruiting table -- apparently, they've had good results finding engineering talent from the Great Lakes region by sponsoring CodeMash -- where you could get "ninja coder" stickers (and pass your prequalification interview!) by figuring out puzzler-type programming questions on posters around the table. Some of these were written in C++ (really?), while a few of the others were in Java. One of the Java puzzlers was a red-herring-filled concurrency problem in which you had to identify a potential deadlock in the synchronized methods (hint: forget the inner classes, this was plain old "A needs B's lock while B needs A's" stuff), while the other Java puzzlers tested your ability to read recursion in methods for counting Fibonacci numbers and for finding common divisors.

Anyways, CodeMash is certainly a unique conference... JavaOne certainly doesn't involve rubbing shoulders with the .NET crowd in a wave pool. They sold out this year and seem disinclined to reconfigure their room setup to accommodate a bigger crowd, so clueful would-be attendees will want to register early for 2010.