John Carmack on Java

John Carmack, the guy who wrote the 3D engines for all three Dooms and all three Quakes, blogged today. About game coding for mobile phones, of all things. And he has this to say about Java as a development platform:

Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha.

How
Very
True.

A bit of background, for the people in the audience who aren't familiar with Java: essentially, one of Sun's early marketing promises about Java was that you could write code once and run it on every computer on the planet, with Sun taking care of the tricky parts of actually talking to hardware. (This technique's called a 'virtual machine', in case you care.)

The problem is, it doesn't work. The abstraction leaks.

Not that this is actually news or anything -- I just felt like pointing it out.