Before I go on with this post, I need to lay my preferences down on the proverbial table. I don't loathe Java, but I definitely lean towards more dynamically typed languages for my own projects. I see Java as a corporate language that really has very little application in open source (which is where I spend most of my time). I'm not going to say anything like "Java sucks" but I will say "I don't much care for Java."

I've been doing a lot of JSP/Servlet work recently. It's more for research than for production use. As someone who's done GOBS of web development, I didn't think it'd be too difficult. Writing the code, getting the syntax under my belt, all these things were rather simple. I've just grown use to the idioms used in web development as a whole, and so that wasn't too difficult (Eclipse made it easier as well, once I found a good JSP plugin).

I think the biggest problem to learning a language is running the code itself. My 12-year-old brother was up and running with python pretty quickly, having Ubuntu's Synaptic installer take care of installation, and then using the python interpreter. C, C++ and Java are a little more complicated. They require knowledge of rather complicated tools, provided you're doing anything more than "Hello World!" There are compilers, linkers, etc. Shoot, in all fairness, even writing your own python modules requires knowledge of how import works.

So I'm writing my Java web app, and I'm getting Tomcat all set up to work. Then I realize that there's more to deploying this app then I originally thought. Now I've got to write an ant build file to automate builds (because compiling all these classes and moving them all to the appropriate directories just isn't practical). After that, I've got to deploy it to the Tomcat server. The barrier to entry is just too high.

When I first started playing with Django, the one thing that really grabbed me was the development server that ships with Django. No mod_python/mod_wsgi/mod_fcgi/whatever to mess with just to see if I wanted to invest more time into the tool. When I started with jQuery and ExtJS, I had the javascript terminal in Firebug to play around with the API and find its strengths and weaknesses.

I'm not saying that a language should necessarily be "so easy a caveman could do it," but I do think that there needs to be a low barrier to entry. If it gets complicated later on, thats fine. Shoot, make some really simple, easy to follow tutorials on how to use the tools. Make explanations on the really simple things, like how library paths are structured, etc. Create tools that don't require 200 different command line flags to compile anything more complicated then your standard "Hello World!"