From fork-admin@xent.com Thu Aug 29 11:03:53 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.netnoteinc.com Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by phobos.labs.netnoteinc.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55F2C44156 for ; Thu, 29 Aug 2002 06:03:45 -0400 (EDT) Received: from phobos [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 29 Aug 2002 11:03:45 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g7SJIkZ07106 for ; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 20:18:47 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B6B129423C; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 12:16:10 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org Received: from smtp1.auracom.net (smtp1.auracom.net [165.154.140.23]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7200129423B for ; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 12:15:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from maya.dyndns.org (ts5-015.ptrb.interhop.net [165.154.190.79]) by smtp1.auracom.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id g7SIp0V22231; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 14:51:01 -0400 (EDT) Received: by maya.dyndns.org (Postfix, from userid 501) id 643D01C388; Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:06:40 -0400 (EDT) To: harley@argote.ch (Robert Harley) Cc: fork@spamassassin.taint.org Subject: Re: Java is for kiddies References: <20020828165937.B53E9C44D@argote.ch> From: Gary Lawrence Murphy X-Home-Page: http://www.teledyn.com Organization: TCI Business Innovation through Open Source Computing Message-Id: Reply-To: Gary Lawrence Murphy X-Url: http://www.teledyn.com/ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@spamassassin.taint.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: 28 Aug 2002 15:06:39 -0400 >>>>> "R" == Robert Harley writes: R> GLM wrote: >> And a Java program, due to the extensive class libraries, will >> weigh in at 10% the number of lines of the equivalent C >> program. QED. R> There are massive amounts of libraries for C, Fortran and so R> on. To pick an obvious example., if you want to do linear R> algebra, then Java isn't a serious candidate at all. If you want to do http, C gets pretty muddy (curl is about the best choice I've found) but I grant you that: No language is the be-all and end-all. I envy some of those posting to this list. I've been in business for 24 years and I haven't yet had the luxury of writing every line of code for any project. We are always coerced by budgets and time to maximize the amount of work done elsewhere. As much as I hate dealing with someone else's blackbox, as much as I've spent sleepless nights second-guessing external libs, I've never ever had the luxury to do otherwise. It must be wonderful to be responsible for something you are actually responsible for, and I am so sick of being blamed for other people's design mistakes. Maybe there's an archive somewhere I need to know about, but I've been using C since DrDobbs first published SmallC and yet I've never found any decent LGPL libs cataloged in such a way that I can just type in the task and get back an API. Because of Javadoc, which is by no means perfect, Java provides me the second best catalog of 3rd-party libs, second only to Perl's CPAN -- Perl is one language I also really hate with a passion, yet end up using the most for exactly this reason. For example, take the recent CBC Olympics site: I needed to roll together a telnet client with a tokenizer, perl-regex preprocessing a stream to produce parseable XML, project that XML into relational databases using only the DTD to generate the rdbms schema, and open an XMLRPC interface to read and post items into the news stream. Where can I find C libs for those components? On the webserver, we then needed a multithreaded read-only http socket which can spawn persistent data-caching servlets that periodically refresh themselves over socket connections to the relational database, presenting the retreived values through XSLT-defined transforms, and again, where can I find such stuff for C ... or for any other langauge but Java? Wombat (servlet spec for Perl) was inviting, but it's not ready for prime-time, and re-inventing that entire shopping list in C is just not feasible for one programmer to do inside of 8 weeks. When you need C libs, or even C++ libs, where's the best place to shop? Where do you find standards-based portable RDBMS API? (ODBC?) How do you evaluate these things without actually fetching every one and trying it out? In a perfect universe, I'd use Ocaml or even Ruby, but I don't see the social infrastructure for either happening during my professional lifetime. R> Why do so many people outside of Sun's marketing department R> consider Java to be "Write Once, Debug Everywhere" ? A collegue at Cognos (Henk?) called C "the nearly-portable assembler" -- Gary Lawrence Murphy TeleDynamics Communications Inc Business Advantage through Community Software : http://www.teledyn.com "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)