How out of date am I?

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:03:00 GMT

I was in the pub last Saturday and the talk turned to programming languages and performance (honestly my friends and I are soooo cool). One friend is the architect for the web systems of a large, national newspaper and he was telling us that Java wasn't suitable for low latency systems. I work on trading systems for investment banks and mainly use Java so was disagreeing with him. His main argument was around delays due to garbage collection.

In many ways we were both right as I was talking about java since 1.3 and he was talking about the last time he touched the language in the 1.1 days. His views were based on (valid) experiences but really needed to be re-examined. Rather than gloat (OK, as well as gloat) I thought that I would look at some of my own preconceptions that could be out of date.

Windows is not a reliable server platform
SQL Server is inferior to Oracle
Open Source products are not stable or supported
XML is slow to process and often unnecessary
Talking loudly about IT tends to make people avoid you in bars

From the above you can probably tell that I like systems created in java that are run on Unix boxes and use Oracle as a database - but normally don't talk about it in pubs.

Are my views out of date and by how long? Perhaps they were never correct? The crux of the issue is how often should people re-examine their opinions on technology?

Coding the Architecture - opinions tag

How out of date am I?