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I'm presuming this is some sort of weird troll, moderated "informative" for some odd reason (seriously moderator, "informative"? What derf?)

Seriously, if you think the Microsoft development tools are far superior to anything else in the world, then I can only presume you've never used anything else in the world :).

You need to ask yourself one thing before starting to learn to program: Do you want to program games, or just make games? The two are different.

A lot of gamers wind up deciding "hey, I want to program video games!" at some point, without realizing that what they really want to do is make games. If you don't know anything about programming, then you should start by learning the basics of programming and forget making video games for a while. You need to understand the basics first, before you can start doing anything complicated.

If you really do decide to make video games, I'd highly suggest making a couple of really simple games first. Something like hangman, where you just take a list of words and make the user enter letters until they "guess" it. This will teach you the basics of keyboard input and graphical display without having to worry too much about speed or game mechanics.

I'd suggest starting with Java too - maybe grab Eclipse as your IDE, or just use a simple text editor. This solves the "cross-platform" part, and as long as you understand that you won't be creating Quake in it, you shouldn't be too disappointed. (You could, of course, also try using Mozilla.) It's similar enough to C and C++ that you'll should be able to pick up those if later you wind up making a game in C.

But based on your post, I'd suggest learning more about how to program in general first. Take some classes, if you can. Learn the basics. Learn about basic data structures. This will give you the ground-work you need to create a game, as well as help you determine if programming is really for you.

I figure you were just trying to be cute and/or get this out of the way, but it does bear a bit more examination.

It's funny that the meme here on /. seems to be "Java is so big, bloated, slow and buggy it just sucks" when in fact it's being used for lots of interesting, cutting edge software projects. Freenet, speech recognition, game development, many Apache projects, Azureus...there are plenty of cool Java packages out there.

The fact is that the industry was badly in need of a sane replacement for C++. Java hit that niche quite nicely, and that accounts for its popularity. C# is 1) an obvious Java knockoff and 2) tied to Microsoft platforms, so it has an uphill battle to get anywhere.

One hopes that Sun sees the light and makes Java open source and standardized soon. In the meantime, though, it sure has a lot to offer. For those who doubt this, download Eclipse and give it a thorough tryout. It can even be built to native code using the free gcj compiler.

Interestingly, though, gcj generated code is often quite a bit slower at runtime than code run using Sun's JRE.

The runtime is a JAR that's about 300KB in size, with about a 1 meg memory footprint.

Companies like BMW and Bosch have chosen it to drive their automobiles and robots respectively.

The best way to get a feel for db4objects is to look at how simple the code is you get to write. For example:

To store a Pilot object:

ObjectContainer db=Db4o.openFile(Util.YAPFILENAME);
try {
Pilot pilot1=new Pilot("Michael Schumacher",100);
db.set(pilot1);
}
finally {
db.close();
}

// Put this in a try-finally block like above
ObjectSet result=db.get(Pilot.class);
while (result.hasNext())
System.out.println(result.next ());

// (use query-by-example)
Pilot proto=new Pilot("Michael Schumacher",0);
ObjectSet result=db.get(proto);
if (result.hasNext()) Pilot firstMatch = (Pilot) result.next();

ObjectSet result=db.get(new Pilot("Michael Schumacher",0));
Pilot found=(Pilot)result.next();
found.addPoints(11);
db.set(found);
System.out.println("Added 11 points for "+found);

Oh, and db4objects works with plain old Java objects. You don't have to implement interfaces, inherit from a particular class, or anything like that.

If you're looking for the simplest, light-weight, zero-administration, embeddable database you could imagine, in my experience, db4objects is it.

(I liked it so much that as of 1.5 weeks ago I started working for the company.)

Best regards,

Dave Orme
--
db4objects senior engineer
Eclipse Visual Editor Project leader (http://www.eclipse.org/vep)
XSWT project leader (http://xswt.sourceforge.net/)

IBM will not port the Notes client to Linux. The strategic direction for the "thick" client that is Notes today, is something based on Eclipse, which has been announced as the IBM Workplace Client. That is what the Lotus division is selling now, and it's what IBM's internal users will get, sooner or later, to replace the Notes client.
And of course it will run on Linux.

Background/predictive compilation isn't too novel or unique either. I used to hack it with scripts and makefiles--they'd basically watch for file writes. I didn't actually use it to catch bugs, as you apparently can in eclipse & xcode now--I just did it so I wouldn't have to wait at the shell when I needed to test. I now use python & can get feedback quickly enough if I use some sort of interactive mode (I am partial to ipython).

From their FAQ, it sounds like eclipse does exactly what my old scripts and makefiles did--compile on file saves. They also call it "incremental." Any eclipse fans out there want to clear this up?

An officemate tells me that Visual Studio also has some sort of background compilation.

Two leading AOP projects, AspectJ and Aspectwerkz, just merged. Their technologies, developer skills, and user communities were complementary, and the resulting common platform will be developed quicker and be of better quality. The user community benefits from sharing and gets bigger, creating more shared benefits...

Competition is useful as incentive and to provide choice, but ultimately something wins because it's better. I think it better to win through mergers, which preserve the best of both companies, er, projects.

http://eclipse.org/aspectj
http://aspectwerkz.codehaus.org/

If you program in C/C++ keep an eye on Eclipse and CDT. It is a nice alternative to Visual C++ for practically any OS.

Most people don't develop software, and so considering the cost of Xcode makes about as much sense as itemizing each background image that comes with the respective operating systems in question, in order to determine the value to the consumer when they're going to download nudie pictures or anime from the Internet and use that instead.

But if they were developing software, I don't know, they might use
one
of the
numereous options available to them for free.

And as for video editing and music editing, I don't have any interest in either. And if my friend wanted me to do anything complicated involving either, I would probably not be qualified to do so anyway. Now if it were simple video editing, there are options.

I doubt very much you would want to pay the premium of a bundled Mathematica with your computer in the off-chance you think you might like to take up mathematics. Nor a bundled Minitab in case you decide you missed your calling as a statistician. But point out that Macs are a poor price-performance competitor and some Mac user will itemize bundled software they don't really use, vacuous claims about the superiority of the manufactured parts, or introduce vague notions regarding aesthetics.

Personally I can't see why anyone with any taste would use Aqua, or programs with ugly brushed metal themes. I don't really see why anyone with any taste would buy a bunch of white objects that will start off by not fitting in with their surroundings, and end up developing a dull tinge as they age. But it isn't really about aesthetics, it's about being superior to others by being in a higher-priced minority, so we can just forego any further discussion about style.

Languages need to evolve out of the pure text medium. This has been happening as incremental hacks to classic languages through code folding editors and AST-aware, intelligent IDEs like Eclipse, literate programming and Python's doctest module. High-level development tools like Delphi were early adopters of the philosophy that code doesn't need to be visualized as text when it's better to visualize it graphically.

The next step is to store not text but structure. For example, why shouldn't I be able to comment on -- annotate -- a specific number in a mathematic formula in my code? With current text-based languages this would be a headache:

double phi = 1 - 1 / (1 + Math.exp(-(cv * /* weight */ 0.3 - range) / sigma));

Instead, I could just select the value in my editor, click on the annotate key, and enter (in nice WYSIWYG HTML or whatever) my comment there. As a result, the editor will show a tiny icon next to the number, or perhaps in the margin, indicating that there's an annotation.

And why are formulas like that represented with such a poor syntax? Why can't I easily use proper Greek letters and standard math notations such as dots for multiplication, a horizontal line for divisions/fractions, etc.? Why can't I insert images into the source file which illustrate the concept it implements?

What I'm talking about isn't just "rich source code", which Donald Knuth's literate programming concept covers to some extent. Languages will experience a revolutionary leap when they start treating language elements as flexible blocks of content as opposed to tokens in an AST. Consider internationalization; instead of looking up a string from a language-specific message table, your source code can include the string in every possible language, hidden away in a single visual representation -- it might look something like:

showDialog("File not found" [English, Swedish, (8 more languages)]);

where "English ..." is a link that opens up a nice GUI letting you change the strings in different languages. The logic to select the string to choose at runtime exists in the string "component" itself.

A common problem in dynamically-typed language is that it's hard to implement optional static typing at the language level. It adds a lot of noisy syntax, and unless you add a lot of syntax, it's hard to solve many ambiguities and special cases. With a rich source format, you can hide away the details, similar to my annotation example.

Unix geeks typically balk at non-textual files, but I blame it on a fundamental lack of imagination. You can have both! Rich source code can be represented as text -- it's just not convenient to edit it like text. Instead, you add intelligence and convenience to your tools. You don't edit your PNG files with Vi -- you use a tool like GIMP or Photoshop.

even slower than it's already glacial performance

Drop the apostrophe in "it's", unless you meant "slower than it is already glacial performance". That doesn't make any sense to me, but perhaps it does to you.

there aren't any CS departments that base their courses on Java, who cares about java

As horrible as the idea may be, there are a number of CS departments that made the Java switch during the big Java boom of the late 90s. My alma mater did the switch, though luckily I was always at least a semester ahead of Java changes.

Seriously, we really need a suite of JAVA tools, like word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc... No more of this "well, it works on Windows, if you want it on Linux or Mac though we'll have to sit down and write it all over again, and probably introduce a ton of bugs....." stuff.

Just as soon as Java gets a good, cross-platform widget set, this can start happening. AWT and Swing aren't it. SWT is the right way to go, IMHO, but since it's not built into Java, it'll never have as much acceptance as AWT or Swing, and Java on the client will continue to be judged by those crappier toolkits.

What good is a program that depends on exact versions of 50 libraries (yeah, like I'll be able to reinstall that in 5 years and have even an outside shot at it working) and only works on a couple platforms, if you're lucky.

Java has the same problem. The Java base librraries are good, but there will always be something you want or need to do that the default set of libraries doesn't supply. What do you do? Well, just like a C programmer, you find a library that has already done what you need, and you use that. As for portability across platforms, you still have to worry about differences in the JRE for each environment and if you make any assumptions about a particular platform (paths, for instance). Java gives you the possibility of being portable, but it doesn't guarantee it.

when you make your own custom hacked windowing system to speed the process (Mozilla), it ends up being a slow RAM hog, even more so than it would be if it was written in JAVA, or another portable language to begin with.

The problem is not writing your own custom hacked windowing system (which XUL isn't -- it's a custom hacked widget set; the difference being that a widget set is the stuff inside the window, while a windowing system handles the windows themselves and doesn't much care what's inside), but writing your own custom hacked system stupidly. Mozilla's XUL is written stupidly, because it doesn't use native widgets (hey, sounds like Swing!). If the Mozilla developers would lose the ego, they would find that there are a number of good cross-platform widget sets (Qt, wxWindows (or wxWidgets, I guess they're calling it now), or even GTK+, though that would be my very last choice for a cross-platform widget set). Instead, the Mozilla team created Firefox when people complained about the weight of the Mozilla suite, yet they left XUL in place. At least there's Galeon, K-Meleon, and even Konqueror (since it can use Gecko as a rendering engine) available as native-widget web browsers.

I think something like Eclipse Wiki http://eclipsewiki.sourceforge.net/ - a plugin for the Eclipse IDE http://www.eclipse.org/ is open source nice alternative for having relational data organization.

Because it's not specificly about Rational.
It's about Eclipse.
Eclipse was Open Sourced in 2001 by IBM and IBM-Rational is to be standardized on Eclipse since last year.
See how it all ties in?

IBM are still the "good guys", aren't they?

There is a plug-in for C/C++.

That about sums it up. I don't love ClearCase (I used to be a raving hater, so simple apathy is a huge improvement), but for large, complex projects, there aren't a lot of alternatives. Apparently, writing a version control system isn't easy. I had a lot of hope for Stellation, but development seems to have faltered.

excuse me, I feel the urge to chime before going back to a long coding session on Eclipse... oh! you're soo right... what a horrible language, you can't really do anything useful with it... I'd better get back to speed on my PHP skillz.

You should look at the Eclipse project at eclipse.org. It's primarily a Java IDE, but it has a rich plugin interface; already there is a C/C++ IDE plugin that makes use of gcc. It has autocomplete and everything. Very nice, especially for Java development. Oh, and it's open source, of course.

You should read about XP (extreme programming)...

I have. And way back into last century even. :-)

You're right that the initial idea is always different after seeing prototypes. But for this exact reason you shouldn't document your code. Code should be disposable, so don't waste time writing other than what the computer needs.

And this is where I'll have to strongly disagree with you. Even "Extreme Programming Installed" (a book I personally belive wonders off a bit from Beck's best XP) says to use UML.

Additionally, some of what I've seen in the best projects is the use of good Javadoc, DOC++, Doxygen or some such comments. The best time to write those is while the design is fresh in people's minds, such as in writing up initial tests or first writing each class. Additionally, it's much easier to keep up to date, and helps greatly as people need to go in and refactor code. Oh, and Eclipse has good Javadoc support, and having Javadoc comments helps it work even better.

Of course, I've gone Extreme myself on different projects by writing Docs in XML. Just poke a single XML with different XSLT stylesheets and get end-user API documentation, internal implementor guide documentation, and full test case source code all from that single sparse XML source. (But especially with all the workflow benefits one gets in Eclipse from having proper Javadoc comments around, those are well more that "disposable").

• ... designed for visualizing and exploring software architecture and any other information space. SHriMP (Simple Hierarchical Multi-Perspective) is a domain-independent visualization technique designed to enhance how people browse and explore complex information spaces. Among the applications we are actively exploring is the exploration of large software programs, and the understanding of complex knowledge-bases (via the Protégé tool)."

Currently SHriMP runs both as a standalone application and, using the Creole plugin, inside Eclipse to augment its existing, extensive code browsing capabilities. There's also a plugin for Protégé, a Stanford project to build "an ontology editor and a knowledge-base editor" supporting new techologies such as OWL.

While Creole is currently Java-specific, SHriMP is a generic framework for code visualization.

Eclipse will also support C/C++ with this plugin: http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

• http://ostermiller.org/utils/com.Ostermiller.util Java Utilities - nice CSV tools among others
• http://protomatter.sourceforge.net/Protomatter - misc tools - object pools etc. (I know, I am lazy)
• http://jedit.org/ JEdit - lightweight, with tons of plugins highly customizable Java IDE/Editor (for those who find the great Eclipse too heavy)
• http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/ Great 100% Java Web Server / Servlet /JSP Container with JMX etc. etc.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartzEnterprise Job Scheduler
• http://mandarax.sourceforge.net/Great open source java class library for deduction rules
• http://alphaworks.ibm.com/Alphaworks as a whole are full of java goodies
• http://eclipse.org/aspectj/Did you ***** up your design ? Your project is a zombie that should be trashed and rewritten ages ago ? Aspects will save your day ;)

Have a look at Eclipse, I've only used it for Java development, but it apparently does most languages. It is quite spectacular for Java though, I must say.

But with SWT Java has the Windows-native GUI look also. Also check out Eclipse. In fact, Borland is using Eclipse for TogetherJ perhaps they will use it for Delphi too...

You'll almost never find "low level" software patents. The ones that you can find and which are enforced, are generally those that cover standards (e.g. on mp3, gif, jpeg).

The MP3, GIF, and JPEG files are not patented.

It can be hard to detect, unless a violator is using those files in their particular implementation. There is nothing to say that the patented methods would be used in compatible files. Without reverse engineering the code or seeing the source code, it's plausibly deniable unless you have an oracle.

Quicktime/MOV files are not patented, however the Sorensen codec is. You can use the Sorensen codec in any compression, with any type of file. You can also use Quicktime with any type of file, but it only violates the patent when Sorensen is decoded

I am not sure if I made clear the potential scope of this predicament. If IBM licenses a patent for Eclipse, then it must be licensed for all derivative software, otherwise it ceases to be open source (per most definitions, eg. the Debian definition or the FSF definition). However, if it is licensed for open source use, then it can be ripped out and used in any other open source software.

As a condition to exercising the rights and licenses granted hereunder, each Recipient hereby assumes sole responsibility to secure any other intellectual property rights needed, if any. For example, if a third party patent license is required to allow Recipient to distribute the Program, it is Recipient's responsibility to acquire that license before distributing the Program.

The main reason I reacted to your post is that I'm part of FFII, and I'm sick of hearing the false mantra that software patents would only affect open source and that only open source people oppose software patents. In practice, today, they mainly affect small and medium-sized proprietary software companies, and not open source groups. The latter also have troubles of course (e.g., VLC recently had to drop support for an audio codec because of patent threats), but most patents are asserted where the money is, and as of yet that is (today) still predominantly in proprietary closed software.

The open source movement is certainly more vocal and informed about the problems regarding software patents, but one of the reasons is that a proprietary software company often doesn't think it's good business to yell "Hey, all these patents could make me go out of business", since clients to not like to buy software from such companies.

Eclipse is not just for Java. You can use it for C and C++, python, COBOL, among others.

Eclipse is not just for Java. You can use it for C and C++, python, COBOL, among others.

My employer is working on an Eclipse-based development environment for their Cascade product, instead of developing yet another custom environment from scratch with all the incompatibility and test overhead that that entails.

Jon.

Well, there is a RAD effort out there, and it is free, and it is called Eclipse (http://eclipse.org/.)

• But I tried netbeans 4.0 beta the other day and I liked what I saw. Out of the box it supports a lot of stuff that eclipse simply does not support (basically all the j2ee stuff, ant integration, xml, html). You can get most of these things in eclipse by installing commercial plugins but if you want everything for free it's pretty hard to find e.g. jsp support, good servlet container integration (more than the pathetic tomcat start/stop support in some eclipse plugins), etc.

If you want everything in one box, you can download Yoxos, an Eclipse distro that comes with a ton of open-source plugins.

As for J2EE, if you're not into bleeding-edge software, until the Web Tools project is ready for production use you might want to check out Lomboz, an extremely popular plugin that provides JSP support, J2EE wizards, app server launching/debugging, web services support and much else.

What's missing from Eclipse's Ant support?

• CDE: yeah, I was just being a jerk.
• GNUStep: All the Mac OS X developers use it! :D But seriously, it's really too bad -- it could have been a contender against .NET if anyone paid attention to it.
• Swing: So what do Java programs use, then? SWT? A cursory glance at this suggests that on Linux it is implemented with Motif, not GTK.
• TK: That's the default GUI toolkit for Python, you know.

Maybe the Visual Editor isn't in release status? (I think it is, but I'm not sure.) But this definately isn't the only nor the first visual editor project. Check it out if you're interested in a RAD platform with graphical elements very similar to Visual Basic, etc. It uses Java and not BASIC, but I don't see that as a bad thing.
Oh yeah... it's also open source.

The Eclipse Visual Editor Project

Sun may not, but IBM is doing pretty well. Try Eclipse and be impressed. You cannot tell it is not a native app. Slightly bigger mem footprint maybe, but not unreasonably so.

And I wonder whether eclipse and java had more to do with that than anything else? I recall that their compilers used to cost a fortune.

Interface Builder on OS X can sort of do this, with the new Controller objects introduced in 10.3. There was apparently a demonstration at WWDC where the guy built a bare-bones but usable web browser entirely within IB.

Interface building tools only help the programmer become more effecient, not replace them. The IB can use Carbon or Cocoa to implement the functionality (i.e. proceedural C and object C), and apparenently you can use Xcode as your IDE. IDEs are out there and some a very useful, personally, I perfer eclipse

4758 Secure Coprocessor Driver for Linux
This project is a Linux device driver for the IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor, which is a tamper-sensing and responding, programmable PCI card. It provides a highly secure subsystem in which data processing and cryptography can be performed.

ATM on Linux
ATM support for Linux is currently in pre-alpha stage. There is an experimental release, which supports raw ATM connections (PVCs and SVCs), IP over ATM, LAN emulation, MPOA, Arequipa, and some other goodies.

Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) for Linux
Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) is an administrative utility that checks whether the underlying protection mechanism of the hardware is being enforced. This is a requirement of the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) FTP_AMT.1.

Ananas Project: Summary
This is the source for Working XML, a column on developerWorks with companion project code that demonstrates the evolution of full-fledged XML applications. This is distributed under the artistic license.

Apache HTTP Server
The Apache project develops and maintains an open-source HTTP server for various modern desktop and server operating systems.

BlueHoc simulator
BlueHoc is a tool that predicts the performance of Bluetooth wireless hardware technologies. BlueHoc simulates the baseband and link layers of the Bluetooth specification.

COIN (Common Optimization INterface)
Developers can use Common Optimization INterface (COIN) to build optimization solutions. IBM mathematical optimization researchers opened the code they use in finding the optimal allocation of limited resources. The code has many applications in a variety of industries.

Channel Bonding
The Channel Bonding project works on methods to join multiple networks on Linux into a single logical network with higher bandwidth. The project team works with the Beowulf Ethernet Channel Bonding project, where bonding work began.

Consensus prototype
Consensus is a joint European project carried out by six companies. The project is partially funded by the European Commission. The project goal is to provide technology to support single-authoring for mobile devices. developerWorks hosts the open source implementation developed by the Consortium. Detailed information about the project is at the Consensus Project home page (http://www.consensus-online.org).

Content Query System (CQS) Project: Summary
Content Query System (CQS). CQS is a distributed peer-to-peer query system for the purpose of discovering content or data. XML messages are passed between systems and query "engines" are used to access the data that is being made available on the system.

Crypto Accelerator Driver
Device Driver Support for the IBM eServer Cryptographic Accelerator.

Crypto Interface Library
Generalized Interface library for the IBM eServer Cryptographic Accelerator Device Driver. Note, this is a low level api for the Specified adapter, it is not intended to be an interface which is written to by applications. Applications should use the openCryptoki PKCS#11 api for interfacing to the token.

Dynamic Probe Class Library (DPCL)
DPCL is an object-based C++ class library that allows tool developers and sophisticated tool users to build parallel and serial tools using a technology called dynamic instrumentation.

Embedded IBM PowerPC 4xx Linux Support
This project contains packages which enable adding support for IBM PowerPC 4xx Embedded Processors to

*cough* eclipse *cough*

Well, I think some people might be trying to help Java compete on the desktop. Have you heard of SWT and Eclipse? It does have IBM behind it. I agree that Sun seriously dropped the ball with desktop Java for years, so nobody used it for that. As for developing desktop apps in C++, yes Visual Studio 6 was a very solid choice. Is VS.NET as good? Many people seem to think not. I haven't spent enough time with it to know, and don't really have the desire to.

I am just curios. What is your "huge disadvantage in software"? Because I am a switcher, and so far I have found 2 things that OSX is lacking in, and only 2.

1. Children's games. We all know that OSX has fewer games than Windows, but Childrens games are much fewer - and most of them that are out barely work at all.

GPS and Mapping. OSX only really has one street mapping software - Route66. Which is merely OK. It is not the most stable, and it doesn't do a whole lot. It won't track GPS histories and such.... There is MacGPSPro, which works good. I have used it for Marine charts, I have yet to import regular maps in, but you can... And there are a few others now as well, and I think Topo! is now out... But Definately OSX, even though it might have GPS/Mapping software - they are less mature than Windows counterparts.

Now having said that, the article missed a couple. Fire is a great IM client, I like it better than Adium. And OSX has CuteFTP and Adobe Acrobat as well...

I have been working full time in OSX for about 2 months now, on a PowerBook 15.GhzG4 with 1GB memory. I am a Java developer, and I use eclipse and other tools. So far I am much happier working in OSX than in Windows. I have been using OSX at home since OSX 10.0.4, and I like it much more than Windows....

I've been using an iBook for a year now and I can tell you, it will be a downer after a while. I'm a software developer (java, perl) and I initially bought the box to be a test bed for an app. When I first got the the box, it was great. I enjoyed the novelty of a different OS. After a while though, I began to realize just how slow the 800MHZ iBook was in comparison to my other boxen (IBM Thinkpad R32 w/XP Pro, and Compaq Evo 1500 w/Suse 9. If I had it to do all over again, I would buy a Powerbook. I use the Eclipse IDE for my Java work and it allows me to build, and test my work on all three platforms easily, but for now, I'll just use my little iBook for testing only. I still love it though.

"C# is better than Java in almost every way:"

About half of C#'s "advantages" are capabilities that the designers of Java considered and rejected as being a bad idea (by making the runtime less stable and secure, unnecessarily complex, etc. -- I knew Guy Steele at the time, and he certainly was aware of operator overloading, generics, etc., and made the (smart, IMO) decision that it was more important to make the language,compiler and JVM (and security model) simpler, smaller and more predictable). You might as well argue that multiple inheritence is "better" than single inheritence; it's certainly useful at times, but it makes it much harder to read code and know what it does, which in the long run is more important than solving some fairly obscure modeling scenarios. Certainly the way that C# deals with native code is nicer than Java, and the Java GUI frameworks aren't great (though there are multiple, competing GUI frameworks to choose from, and SWT is great). But C#'s advantages are, as you point out, not a matter of any novel ideas, just making some incremental improvements and different mistakes, so overall (IMO) it's not clear to me that it's really "better" than Java, just very similar with some different, debatable design decisions.

"As for "industry support", you have got to be joking."

By industry support, I mean that there are many more Java programmers than C# programmers, many more companies and open source projects providing Java resources (libraries, app servers, etc.) than C#, etc. Yes, MS is big, but are they bigger than IBM, Sun, BEA, etc., not to mention the entire Java development community? Yes, MS can through sheer muscle get their VM distributed onto PC's, so there's no doubt that eventually they'll be able to drive a chunk of the world to use C# (i.e. it'll be easy to get some people who use only MS tools to use MS's new tool), but Sun's got JVM's made nearly universal on cell phones, preinstalled on millions of PC's, etc., ... so while MS does have powerful marketing muscle, pretty much everyone else in big the tech space committed to Java years ago, and has been investing $billions in making sure that they're ahead of MS.

And we can look at SourceForge as a rough measure of Developer support. Of the roughly 90K projects, 12,784 are in Java, and 1,824 are in C#. So after a few years of a massive PR push, C# is at 14% of Java's adoption. Not to be sneezed at, but that puts it as a contender to Delphi (1,557) and JavaScript (1,932), which are relatively obscure as application languages. At least it's more popular than TCL (816) or Prolog (89).

Or let's look at the number of app servers available. How many companies provide J2EE implementations are available? See http://www.theserverside.com/reviews/matrix.tss -- they list 30+ companies. How many companies provide .Net app servers? I can't find a list, but I only know of one. :-)

So I guess what you're arguing is that with MS behind it, C# is going to get lots of developer support, and will mature, eventually. That's probably true, since MS is unlikely to cancel C# (more embarassing to kill C# than Bob...). But it hardly shows that C# has more industry support than Java.

"When they make the CLR come pre-installed on Longhorn, it will instantly become an industry standard"

If the CLR's penetration is driven by Longhorn, that means that it won't be something developers can assume until when, 2009? Look at XP -- completely anemic takeup rates, essentially zero consumer upgrades, so it's only being deployed as new system purchases, which means something like a five year replacement rate. In the corporate world, Windows 2000 is the standard platform -- upgrading to XP is messy enough to deal with that most large companies are still forcing vendors to ship new PC's with Win2000 to keep XP out of their environment to maintain a standard, supported platform. So

No matter how good Gnome and KDE have gotten, if the .net and JAVA software is lacking (Mono is not nearly complete, and is exactly fighting this catch-up game, JAVA is a nifty SUN Trap)

Between gcj, Kaffe, JamVM, SableVM, all driven by the GNU Classpath library, experimental stuff like Jnode, and the massive wealth of Java code in projects like Eclipse and those driven by the Apache Foundation..

I'd say that Free java is alive and kicking. Yeah, it still hasn't become usable with respect to AWT/Swing. But most of the core is there, even up to some 1.4 stuff. (and work on 1.5 features is underway)

I don't buy the "catch-up game" argument. Most people don't write programs for the absolute latest and greatest. Platforms tend to reach a certain level of maturity which is 'good enough' for most people, and then it slows down. I think that soon enough, the free Java implementations will be able to compete with Sun's.

For example, how many compilers can you name which fully implement the C99 standard?

Everything is a catch-up game... it's just a question of what the game looks like. MS can arbitrarily change things in the Word file format just to screw with people. APIs don't work that way though, you don't change an API unless you have to.

Uh, you're being facetitous right?
Try Eclipse.

I'll be convinced IBM contributes as much as Sun to OSS when I see that IBM has GPLed AIX like Sun will GPL Solaris...

Funny, the latest I've heard was that Sun still isn't saying what license they plan to use for Solaris. Do you have a link to an article where Sun claims they will use the GPL? All I've heard from them is that they want to "take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris."

Personally, as a Linux user, I'm much interested in IBM's real contributions to the Linux kernel. Their intent is to make Linux capable of replacing AIX eventually.

I'm not just talking about mainframe and POWER ports, as an anonymous coward above suggested, either. Of course, we all know about JFS, NUMA, SMP scalability, and EVMS (the last of which wasn't accepted, in the end). IBM has also contributed work on ext2/3, IA-64, PCI hotplug, udev, USB, and a number of other projects.

...or that IBM has given a huge office solution like OpenOffice...

How many office solutions do we need? How about a huge software development solution like Eclipse, instead?

...or that IBM supports Gnome with code contribution/HIG...

How about donating code to projects like Mozilla, Samba, and of course Apache (and more Apache)?

Finally, let's not forget that it's IBM that is paying the legal bills that will prove that Linux is free of whatever UNIX intellectual property may still exist, while Sun has been pumping funds into SCO's war chest.

They're not open-sourcing anything resembling ViaVoice to the Eclipse folks. Check out the eclipse voice tools proposal. It's directed at making it easier at creating call-center type voice reco apps - not at making Eclipse a voice-directed IDE.

If you're interested in open-source voice recognition check out OSSRI - an effort to bring together some sort of practical large vocab speech recog to linux. They're just starting up, but the mailing list archives hold a fair amount of discussion about the current state of the open-source SR world. (Which, to sum up, isn't that great :-) As a stop-gap they're hoping to get WINE support for Dragon/Scansoft NaturallySpeaking.

A voice tools proposal has been posted on eclipse site.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation, incorporated in Delaware, USA, in June of 1999.

From http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/Eclipse%20BYL AWS%202003_11_10%20Final.pdf

The Eclipse Foundation is formed exclusively as a non-profit trade association, as set out in section 501 (c) (6) of the Internal Revenue Code (the "Code").

One thought: read your own link: http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-voicetool s/index.html

It is also worth noting that the Eclipse Foundation recently introduced the Eclipse Public License, and are in the process of transitioning all code from the CPL to the EPL.

All new contributions will be under the EPL, so if IBM wants to donate anything to the Eclipse project it will be under this license.

Eclipse is actually a kind-of Swiss Army Chainsaw -IDE. You can make plugins for pretty much everything, so one could speculate that a voice recognition plugin would be feasible.

I don't know about everyone else, but the concept of coding by voice does fascinate me. There are obvious issues (like eliminating having to say every single control character (if at all possible)), but with a background of RSI I think it's at least worth a shot.

Thoughts?

The average programmer doesn't care the the hierarchy is 10 or 11 levels deep (well at least until the next avalon release comes out). But Microsoft should care, and Ximian also cares. Very deep inheritance hierarchies are tough to maintain. Inheritance is a pretty intimate binding of two classes and changes higher up in the hierarchy sometimes have disasterous changes down the line. From a talk that I heard Stroustrup give, he doesn't care for them much either. (I didn't attend this one, but I imagine it is the same based on the slides.)

In this day and age, the commonly accepted wisdom is that you break functionality into interfaces and you write shallow helper classes to degalate to for common implementations of those interfaces. (C# is quite possibly the best language there is for supporting this architecture.) This way you don't force the user to use implementations they don't want when they want to program to a particular interface in your system.

If you look at the code for eclipse, you'll see a good example of this design in action.