Java certainly has its charms, especially since the vastly improved 3D handling that has emerged recently. And there's a JRE and JDK for just about any hardware/OS platform around. NetBeans is a nice and free comprehensive development environment (but needs a fast machine). The Eclipse environment is pretty cool too, but it's not fully platform independent.

There's only one gotcha. If you want a Java app that is really robust and fast, you need another JRE, not the free reference JRE from Sun. And the really fast and robust JREs are EXPENSIVE! The one that comes with WebSphere often outperforms native C/C++ compiled apps, since the JRE optimizes for the machine the code is run on, not for the machine the code is developed on. But WebSphere is a) far too large a package to purchase for a good JRE alone, and b) out of budget for everyone except large companies (several hundred thousands of dollars....)

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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