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Public Standards: C# 2, Java 0
TheAncientHacker writes "While Java coders wait for SUN to be willing to accept any public standards for the Java language and runtime, Microsoft's C# and its underlying CLI, already standardized by ECMA, are about to get a second certification. This time by by the granddaddy of certification groups, the ISO."
I guess I'll just stop coding in it.
that's too bad really - I liked java.
seriously - why should we care? does the code allow me to do what I want? yes.
and done - I don't care about no stinking standards evaluation.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Who actually owns copies of those standards? I know I don't - simply because they charge several hundred bucks a copy.
As the artical says: The academic community benefits perhaps more from the published specifications to do computer science research than do companies.
Academic research is fine, but when I'm looking for new programmers I would much rather have real-world experience. How many academic programs you wrote as an undergrad (or even a grad student) had to run for hours or even weeks and maybe with direct user interaction and not crash? Standards don't help you learn how to code that.
Most Microsoft shops have or will switch to .NET (it's a natural progression), and of course Microsoft shops comprise the majority of "shops" out there. Indeed the most telling evidence of .NETs stunning market presence can be seen at your local bookshop: Already there are probably 2x the number of .NET books than there are Java books (seriously, go take a look).
It seems like Microsoft is trying to change their image from industry bully to industry team player. I have just been to an academic presentation of .NET and I must admit that MS studio .NET is very easy to learn and use, as well as being standards based.
.NET platform is built around Windows and the "Write in any language, run on windows" idea is not very attractive at least to me.
.NET to other OS (the rotor project). However, rotor is not meant to be used in production, which makes it rather useless in real life.
:)
The problem that I see with Microsoft is their attitude of Windows being the only operating system. The entire
You may argue that MS has already ported
If you look at the Java camp, however, things aren't that great either. The tools are generally not as well integrated and Sun is trying too hard to control Java.
So, in conclusion, I'm not sure which is better. For now, I am staying with Java for my courses. But the battle is far from over
Could the fact that there are twice as many books for C# indicate that it's twice as hard to use? ;-)
Many of my college classes were taught using Java as the programming language, so I had a few years of experience with it in school. I've been using .NET since it was released, and it's been so much easier programming in VB.NET and C# than it ever was in Java, it's not even funny. Despite their problems, the Visual Studio .NET IDE and MSDN Library have no equivalent. They are totally awesome.
You've obviously not tried to use Kaffe for any serious work.
Blackdown is a port of Sun's JVM.
You might have mentioned IBM's JVM, but that's just as proprietary as Sun's.
Remember that the JVM includes libraries, and without a complete set of working, compatible, debugged libraries your Java development is basically fscked.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Well the thing is, most of MS's "evil" is because they are big. Any small evil thing they do is blown up huge by the huge impact it has. And especially here by the just plain outright hatred that emasses here.
In fact I find that Sun and Apple are frequently quite a bit MORE evil if you remove the entire market share from the equation and look at their actions more philosophically.
Relentless pursuit of fans, maniacal leaders that spew verbal FUD at every oppourtunity, closing down the clone markets, faking JRE test software to make your 4x slower JRE seem as good as the competitions, selectively applying JRE compatibility rules to various friends/competitors and on and on.
As far as Sun stumbling in the dark, that have done that for JAVA since day one. The early development tools were practically non-existant. And until recently, installing their JRE on Windows required the user to hand edit their environment to add a path to the JRE to it to make it work, even from the windows GUI. How much harder could they make it on themselves and their customers? I always thought that they blew it with their incredable poor dev. environment for JAVA. Compared to developing VB or VC++ on windows it was like using rocks and sticks. UNIX programmers were right at home with the sytem as it of course mimicked typical UNIX development (No suprise, they're SUN!)
Though MS took advantage of JAVA in ways they probably shouldn't have, Windows developers people were starving for good JAVA tools on Windows and MS stepped up to the plate while Sun didn't. If Sun had provided a Visual Studio type dev environment from day one for all three platforms I believe a HUGE army of Windows developers would have jumped on it and Sun's JAVA would have taken off strong, instead it limped then and it still limps today.
I am particularly perterbed by Sun's lack of support (or rather lack of EXTREME support) for Java as it is my daily duty at work to find usable cross platform tools for our software dev. needs and though we have actually used some JAVA with some success, it has been a lot more dissapointing as a dev. environment and as a platform than it should be.
Your C++ program might not need the standard library, but your C# program will. Everything in C# is reflected and so on, so if you don't have the .NET framework with the Type object, for example, you can't have any types, which leaves you screwed. With no .NET framework you can't have objects, methods, or anything.
Also, anyone submitting a standard to the JCP relinquishes patents on any parts of the standard.
.Net!! No Sir!!
Not that Microsoft would do anything funny with Patents and
Wasn't April 1st yesterday?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually Microsoft did this not to run Unix apps but to get government contracts which require posix compliance. Microsoft made sure it was crippled in return so they would migrate to win32 after it became apparent that the posix layer was broken.
http://saveie6.com/
I work for Sun, and while I won't pretend to speak for them, I work most of the time on the various J2EE JSRs, so I sort of understand how the whole process works, and therefore understand the rationale for why Java isn't an ECMA or ISO standard.
.NET, though, it is possible to get involed in the development of Java and J2EE, either directly as an individual member of the JCP, or indirectly by providing comments during the public reviews of JSRs.
The Java Community Process (http://www.jcp.org) is an independent organization that sets the standards for Java. Anyone can join the JCP, although most members are companies. The Java language, the different distributions of Java (J2SE, J2EE, J2ME), and technologies that are built on Java use Java Specification Requests (JSRs). Various members (the expert group) collaborate on the JSR to define the technology, and work on a reference implementation. For example, Tomcat is the reference implementation of the JSP and Java servlet APIs. This is one major difference between ECMA/ISO and the JCP: the requirement of a reference implementation.
I think the idea behind the JCP was to be able to modify the language and the APIs more quickly than other standards bodies, and ensure that there are useful implementations of the standards that go hand in hand with the standard.
In the case of Apache, there have been some modifications to the JCP to allow open-source implementations of JSRs, and to make the compatibility tests available for non-profits. JBoss and Sun have locked horns because, in Sun's view, JBoss is not a non-profit, and are using the J2EE JSRs to make money without licensing the J2EE brand, as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Borland, and others have done. Because Apache is in fact a non-profit organization, Sun's been much more willing to work with them.
Sun produces most of the JSRs, but not overwhelmingly so (around 60% if I remember correctly). Your average open-source hacker will find it harder to contribute to a JSR compared to, say, Gnome or KDE. Unlike
There are many people at Sun that would like the public more involved in developing Java, and others who would not.
Keep in mind that this is my impression of Sun's rationale, and I do not speak for Sun on any level.