This is going way off topic, but I think Java is intended for situations where you have a small core team of highly competent programmers and a large pool of semi- and incompetent ones, with no easy means of distinguishing the latter two categories. It allows you to create an environment where certain tasks are easier to do and can be delegated without the results being too disastrous. This is fine when performance often doesn't matter (though I understand Java is capable of as good or better performance than C/C++). The security model in Java was a key feature for a long time, though similar mechanisms seem to be more widely available now such as AppArmor.
A lot of phone games have been written in Java, during the period before the iPhone. Further, C/C++ and DirectX are used extensively for games to some extent because of precedent, which suggests it's not the only way of doing things, just the way people know how to do them. Russell
