Even Sun Can't Use Java

cowmix writes "It turns out that Sun does not eat its own dog food. Specifically, this internal memo from Sun strongly suggests that Java should not be used for Sun's internal projects. More interesting still, they go on to state which other languages fullfil Java's goals better than Java does itself. Finally, the memo states Sun's own Solaris is the cause of many of Java's woes. Yikes."

Comments

Re:It would be interesting to find...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to ask....why?

Because it's better than what Sun has right now (OpenWindows).

Who here hasn't had to download an older version of the JRE because you've found a program that doesn't work on the newer versions. JAVA isn't, nor has it ever been, platform independant. It continues to be unstable on more platforms than just solaris and really doesn't provide that much of an advantage over ANSI C/C++. Yeah, it was cool back in the days before DHTML, Flash, and XML. But now it offers very little additional functionality.

You are barking up the wrong tree. We are talking about desktop applications for Solaris, not applets for IE.

I may be commiting a sin to say this on slashdot, but just because it's free doesn't mean it's worth using.

Java isn't free, and Sun's motivation for using it would be to replace an even more awful system.

Re:Political memos

[panurge]

Faint praise is all you'll get from me for any programming language. After all, look at current human languages. Despite thousands of years of development they all have big problems:

• English - mixture of phonetic and non-phonetic, inconsistent grammatical rules, too many different versions with inconsistencies of use.
• Japanese - too many different representations, too difficult for most people
• French - poor phonetics, some convoluted expressions, too many written inflexions that sound the same.
• German - unnecessary and inconsistent inflexion, over-use of compound words, difficult verb placement for simultaneous translation.

Despite which we continue to use these languages and users of each continue to defend their superiority. Oh, and the bugs don't get fixed.

I think the best we can do is be realistic, and try not to get too hung up on the sucks/cool dichotomy.

Performance

[markbthomas]

Take two example: ./hello, written in C, and hello.class, written in java.

mark@twix tmp $ time ./hello
Hello, World!

real___ 0m0.001s
user___ 0m0.000s
sys____ 0m0.000s
mark@twix tmp $ time java hello
Hello, World!

real___ 0m0.230s
user___ 0m0.160s
sys____ 0m0.030s

I mean, really...

Java is a toy language

[Progman3K]

I've programmed for a few years in Java and for a few years in C and C++ and in my opinion, Java is just not worth the effort.
Sure, it'll enable feeble-minded programmers to write code and help them not worry about nasty things like memory and pointers, but in fact, if you ARE an accomplished programmer, you don't need that kind of a crutch anyway.
I know it's very politically-correct to keep lowering the bar for everyone, but I seriously believe that there are a huge number of programmers out there who should be working as plumbers or opticians, and who basically jumped onto the IT bandwagon when it was hot in the 90s or because it was cool in our present decade.
Software quality is NOT going up, it is going DOWN. Why? Because many no-too-gifted developers are jumping into computer science as a career, and Java is just the very embodiment of that; a poorly thought-out language with glaring engineering and architectural lacunae.

More fuel for the raging flame

[Valen Faerlwynd]

Well, this is certainly more fuel for the long-standing argument "Why I Hate Java".

Unfortunately, it's part of the curriculum at my college. Let's not even get into the fact that they change textbooks every semester because the current one isn't "adequate" enough.

Love and Peace,
Valen