Well, if you want to consider dynamic weeb page development “programming”, then point taken. (I assume that was your point.)
To me, that’s little more than scripting. And besides, perl is pretty popular for that purpose too.
You realize that the article you’re posting under really isn’t about Java. It’s just that I can also think about the issues you raise.
Yes, JSP does offer an alternative to in page scripting. I don’t use it myself, but never thought there was much reason to argue with people who do. At first, it looked like you had to refresh whole pages to use it - which irritated me to no end, so I argued against using it myself. You could do it so much nicer with Ye Olde DOM techniques.
and HTML5 is supposed to expand and simplify interaction with server based process. :)
But BTW: networking is useful for more than serving web pages.