Java developers

I'm about to start a CS program in which Java is the language of choice. Knowing that I'm going to be putting a fair amount of effort into this languge, I have begun to have a couple of questions.

1) Why don't we see more java programs? Especially in the linux world, java programs seem to be a rarity (as compared to C++). Off the top of my head I can only think of one major program (from the end user view) that is big with java, and that is OpenOffice.org.

2) What are java's strengths here? I know that GUI has been previously a soft spot for java, however with the introduction of GTK-java (through the Mono project) is java becoming more viable?

3) Speed issues used to abound (there was a point a couple of years ago when I was following java development), however have most of those issues been mitigated with static/ JIT compilers?

After learning java, how hard is it to move onto one of the bigger languages? (C++, C# etc.)

Just added my first bug in commons-lang. Actually its more of an enhancement rather than a problem, but Bugzilla calls all of them bugs.

Its a smallish code snippet that would allow me to format one way and parse another. It gets rid of me writing the code:

DateFormat parser = new SimpleDateFormat("...format A...");
DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("...format B...");
Date foo = parser.parse(getFromWeb());
String bar = formatter.format(foo);


Reducing it to

Format doh = new CompositeFormat(new SimpleDateFormat("...format A..."),new SimpleDateFormat("...format B..."));
Date foo = doh.parse(getFromWeb());
String bar = doh.format(foo);


That may seem like overkill, but its more usueful if you want to create a set of constant formatters which would combine the formatting for you.

this could be off-topic (ok, it prolly is, delete it if its heinous...)...

Microsoft Outlook has a type of list called Distribution Lists, but Outlook doesnt have any option to export into CSVs. Is there an easy Java program that can be written to take these distribution lists and convert them into CSVs? Am I in the wrong language?

In an article on thread safety (linked from a previous thread), I was alarmed to read this paragraph.

As an example of this pitfall, the class java.text.SimpleDateFormat is not thread-safe, but it wasn't until the 1.4 JDK that this was documented in the Javadoc. How many developers mistakenly created a static instance of SimpleDateFormat and used it from multiple threads, unaware that their programs were not going to behave correctly under heavy load? Don't do this to your customers or colleagues!

I bet I've done that a few times. Does anyone know if this applies to other DateFormat classes?