But my first reaction on headline before reading the article was "Ugh. I'm sorry". (I will read it in a second, I felt this obdurate urge to rant BEFORE I read it).
I coded in Java for work (After being hired to do Java) for years, then went over to Python, and worked with some C# for about a year. Now I'm back working with Java, and Scala (for which I have lots of love - it has a lot of what I love about Python but in many cases better).
There are little things in C# that just really give it an edge over Java. Among other things relating to Generics (Which are awful to begin with in that the JVM currently erases type information at compile time [Scala has a few clever hacks to get around it]) - as I understand it, C#/CLR automatically generates multiple specialized paths for all possible primitive types with generic collections.
And being a fan of closures, anonymous functions, etc. Java is just painful. C# has these, and more.
Now Off to read the article :)
I do think, however, that the JVM is much more advanced than the CLR, and really the only one of the two that is truly cross platform and open.
Templates in C++ or the generic types from Haskel enable parametric polymorphism which is a lot more elegant for certain problems than subtype-polymorphism (i.e. OOP).
Java's generics is only a hack to make it look as though some piece of code that's using subtype-polymorphism is parametric ... but it only saves you explicit type-casts, which are also useless.
dotNet's generics are different ... while sharing the same limitations (i.e. no late binding and not implicit interfaces), because the types are available at runtime the runtime dispatches being made aren't just hacks and you can use the reflection mechanism to workaround many of the problems associated.
I am rewriting a C# app in Java right now and I'm being forced into extremely awful hacks to prevent memory consumption from exploding. To illustrate how bad the situation is let me tell you that I'm seriously thinking about rewriting everything in C++ :-)
T obj;
obj = getObjFromSomewhere();
log(T.class);
They clearly didn't port the CLR libraries to the JVM, so they must have modified their code to work with Java libraries, e.g. Swing, etc. To me, it seems like this would be the bulk of the work, not language translation from Java to C#.
They probably should have given it a try, because if it had worked, it would have opened up a possibility that they seem to have completely overlooked. Use Grasshopper to convert at the bytecode level, then use a Java decompiler to go from bytecode to Java source.
You'd lose comments in the source code that way, but I bet it would not be hard to write a tool to transfer the function level comments from the C# source to the Java source. Subsequent hand editing to translate any C#-isms to Java-isms in the comments, and restore any crucial sub-function level comments, would probably have only taken a few days.
From the article, their requirements included:
one of the first tasks we got was to make the management application cross platform, well this was expected considering the fact that the acquisition was done by RedHat.
And:
Sticking with C# requires technologies to help us run it on Linux. We found Mono ..., and the second option we found was Grasshopper which is a project of Mainsoft to compile MSIL to Java Bytecode. ... These 2 solutions were taken off the table ... we wanted to use a technology supported by Red Hat.
So it appears to me that the decision had nothing at all to do with technical strengths of the language. Moreover, it had nothing to do with the platform as such -- whether its technical strengths or any end-user demographics -- but purely politics driven by Red Hat.