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Java Creator James Gosling on C# And More
DreamTheater writes: "Java inventor James Gosling says he isn't losing much sleep over Microsoft these days, despite the software giant's effort to stem Java's popularity with its own Java-like language." Gosling talks about other things in this interview, too, like his current project of developing a good IDE.
'You guys (at Microsoft) still don't get it,' because it's sort of Java with reliability, productivity and security deleted."
... this attitude worked for Windows 95, so why should MS be rattled by these remarks?
Quite simply
Once Microsoft have got the market share, they can work on the reliability and security.
I think from the level of people who make decisions about what programming languages to use on commercial projects (this includes me), the technical distinctions between Java and C# are of little concern: the languages are so similar that they are basically interchangeable. What matters is who supports it, what libraries are available, how mature are the implementations, whether it's a single-vendor or mult-vendor solution, how well it integrates with the platform, and how many programmers are available.
For pure Windows programmers, C# wins there and will probably be picked up by lots of VB and VisualC++ programmers. But people who live in that world are already not using Java. For everybody else, Java seems to win hands down. I think C# will neither be a complete failure nor will it do much harm to Java.
"You guys (at Microsoft) still don't get it,' because it's sort of Java with reliability, productivity and security deleted"
.NET is a significantly more "productive" language than Java as it is based on a much higher level of abstraction. You can concentrate on immediately doing things your application (Web, Client, etc.) is supposed to DO than the plumbing to get to that stage. Visual Studio.NET is easily the most productive environment I have ever seen, but the article concentrated on C# so...
...security deleted". The .NET approach puts the onus on the developer (you know, the one with the brain) to decide what they want to do, and how they want to do it. In order words don't penalise all developers to script kiddie level, realise there are different problem spaces and different levels of developers and let them figure it out themselves.
.NET, have done since Beta 1, and find it a joy to use. Stability even from the earliest builds simply was amazing (especially considering its an MS product) and brings a lot of the "fun" back to programming (doing stuff instead of writing or finding/using support libraries). But I do have a background in Java, having programmed in it for the past 4 years...put simply, I'll choose which language/environment to use depending upon the project.
Er, no, Sun really don't get it. C# on top of
Microsoft haven't forced people to use the highest abstraction, you can choose to do much lower level things ("unsafe code" for instance). I assume this is what Mr. Gosling is referring to with "reliability,
Yes I program in
...fire extinguisher ready and waiting...
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