Particularly poorly written post follows:

I hope I'm not the only person -- and therefore, by definition, also the first -- to think the chosen winners of Sun's NetBeans' Look and Feel Competition! are horrendously embarassing for what they suggests about the stereotypical programmer. Of the thirty winners in the competition -- a redesign contest for the GUI of the Sun-supported tool for designing Java code -- at least four have backgrounds that include relatively attractive women, some awfully prominently displayed.

I've complained about this same sort of lack of professionalism from a Sun supported initiative before, but to give out prizes for essentially showing you could follow a tutorial that showed how to embed pin-ups in your application (what happens at the above link) simply by including more examples of such pin-ups combined with the most trivial of modifcations to the UI elsewhere is in very bad taste.

Let's be clear -- none of these winners foreground men, not that that would make the ones winning any more deserving. Hrm. None of the winners really seem superior in any practical sense to Netbeans' default look and feel. Most of these are trying harder to be bad art than functional improvements. So we've got a bunch of horny guys who'd like to insert pictures of women into their IDEs in place of having girlie calendars on the wall of their garage.

Is there anything inherently wrong with having viewing pictures of attractive women? No. But please, Sun's winners aren't artistic, are sexist, do not promote professionalism, nor show any way that the benefits are particularly practical ones for designing GUI'd apps in Java. In a society where such moves are considered offensive, well, such a move has to be considered exactly that. Are Netbeans employees really so naive that they don't realize many women in a Java programmer's workplace would prefer not to see this kind of junk on coworkers' screens? I know I don't have any particular desire to have an extended conversation staring at code with, say, The Rock shirtless in the background.

Hey Sun, apologize, rerun the contest, and demand a little more true innovation in lieu of something that quite literally pimps your products.