>And that's already, you know, 5-10% of practising programmers. It's not the vast masses of Java monkeys who were formerly VB monkeys who were formerly COBOL monkeys who are just doing, you know, large swathes of extremely boring stuff internally somewhere. <

I'm certainly not above the occassional look down my nose at Java, but how do you suppose someone would move to Java from VB without reading a few books or manuals?