What Bruce Eckel really taught me.

I remember on the late 90's when I was in college we were going to start learning Java. Java 1.1x was on the market for some time and version 1.2 was very new and we were very excited to learn that version of Java.

The teacher told us we can download an eletronic book from the internet called "Thinking In Java" by Bruce Eckel. This was a great book and was a free download, so everyone on the class got it.

But the first pages of the book has a strange dedication:

Dedication:

To the person who, even now,

is creating the next great computer language

What? The author wrote a huge book about Java on and the first pages of it is promoting for someone else to create another computer language? Instead of saying "Java is great", "you rock by using Java" or "nothing can beat Java", the author is trying to say that there is something better coming on the future. 

That was a huge lesson for me. Java is a great computer language and I think it had evolved over time like no other language. I think that Java is "open enough" to be used freely and that's why it had defeated several other languages on the market. 

But Bruce Eckel taught me on the phrase the basic of computer science. Everything is changing, everything is evolving, when you think that nothing can beat a specific technology, someone else will prove that you are wrong. 

So today, when I see Android, iOS, C#, Java, or something else, I remember Bruce Eckel's book dedication and it the end I have the certainly that "nothing is here to stay" and I need to always keep my eyes open for change.