I like your signature. It seems Java is for the programmers who follow the philosophy "Why do things the easy way, when you can do things the hard way?". Anyway, when I learned programming, the teachers said to us that if we know C/C++, we can learn any language. Even today, though somewhat cryptic, I can think of C/C++ among the best languages. But one is to have an efficient programming language, and another is to have a descriptive programming language (this would be Java).