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The Future of Java?
Todd AvErth writes "Judge Motz recently ordered Microsoft to distribute Sun's JVM with every Windows product. Salon decided to pipe up about it with an editorial musing about whether or not it's too late. Most of it isn't all that interesting, but some of the comments from Ximian developer, Miguel de Icaza point to the advantage of being able to compile from multiple languages. Anyone know of any projects to compile JVM bytecode from other languages?" Update: 01/23 16:00 GMT by M : Comments were disallowed when this story was originally posted; fixed now. My mistake (although KDE3's stupid mouseover-activates-form-elements user interface, now finally fixed in the latest versions, has to take some blame too).
That is pure bull shit, C++ is sufficiently screwed up that nobody can get it to run in managed code. However Microsoft have got pretty much every other language - Basic, Python, Eifel, Cobol, Perl, Scheme etc. to run. So the claim that .NET is language neutral is not disproved by choosing the single contrary data point that Microsoft themselves make no effort to hide. The only major languages that don't run are Common Lisp and C++, both of which have multiple inheritance which language design has been backing off from for years.
As for C# 'copying' single inheritance from Java, COM had single inheritance from the get go. I would be very surprised if Microsoft didn't have coding rules that prohibit using multiple inheritance and compiler flags to disable it for internal use. Every large software house that tried C++ in the early days discovered that multiple inheritance led to disaster. The programs could only be understood by their original authors.
C# borrows some stuff from Java but it borrows rather more from objective C. It also has meta-data tagging which if you know how to use it is massively useful.
Sure C# could have been an evolution of Java in the same way that Java was an evolution of C. The only reason it wasn't was Sun's decision to insist on full control of Java and sicking lawyers on Microsoft for wanting to use it to do other things.
Sun has repeatedly promised to make Java open and every time it has reneged. The Java Community Process was created to ensure that Sun kept control of Java, it is not an open standards process in any meaningful sense of the term. Sun retain effective control over every aspect of Java language design. The JCP is independent in the same way Vichy France was independent of Germany.
What Microsoft wanted to do was to use Java as a replacement for C++. To do that they had to have a bunch of stuff that Java didn't have so they added it. That is how every language prior to Java has evolved. For years the standard for Fortran was VAX Fortran.
Sun's hardware business is collapsing under pressure from low cost Linux on Intel boxes. They have failled to make any money from Java, execept by using it to drive sales of their hardware boxes to dotcoms when those still existed. If you think the SCO/Unix situation is bad just wait a few years until Sun has gone the way of SGI and their lawyers are looking to extract whatever value they can from their 'Intellectual Property'.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Emacs is an editor (and pretty much everything else), but it is NOT a compiler. Notice that GCC is not GPL, since it being GPL would cause everything to become GPL as well.
And since java has a ton of standard classes, linking to those classes would require your program to become GPL.
And you do not want to bind a language to a licence. What would ensure that your gnu/java is compatible with my gnu/java? Nothing. If anything it should be given to a standards body, like for instance the EMCA.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
An enterprise application is one with multiple components, geographically distributed,
If it is on the Internet, then why does it have to be *geographically* distributed? Just make one big-bass server room running things like Oracle somewhere in Denver. That way you don't have to duplicate similar configurations and setups all around the country (or world). (With off-site backups, of course).
Smells like a conspiracy to sell duplicate Sun-boxen to me.
Table-ized A.I.