Nicholas Carr weighs in on Apex
Carr wrote a piece on Apex the other day. He also noted the similarity with SAP, but more from the perspective of vendor lock-in. Do people want to write apps in a proprietary language?
My conjecture is that all complex applications are married closely to whatever system they are developed on, whether commerical or open source, and that portablility is mostly an illusion for these types of systems. Once they are built, they aren't going anywhere without a lot of blood, sweat and tears. So, the choice is really one of which platform is going to be the best one for this application for the forseeable future? There are quite a number of applications where the answer could be Apex (or something like it).