Slashdot Mirror
James Gosling on Java
prostoalex writes "It's been ten years since the official introduction of Java - a programming language combined with virtual machine and a class library. ZDNet published an interview with James Gosling, the creator of Java, who talks about the project's past, present and future."
If anyone is interested in conversing with James Gosling one-on-one, he (amazingly) hangs out at DevShed.com in the forums, likes to aswer questions, and my guess is he knows what he's talking about when it comes to Java. Even more amazing is that as smart a guy as he is, his social skills leave a lot to be desired (read some of his posts in the Lounge).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why the hell did the interviewer decide to turn it into a "how did/does/will Java work with MS technologies" diatribe?
I mean, theyre so disparate in ideaology, while I can understand some of the relationships, why on earth bring them up with the creator of a language that MS has deliberately shunned when they couldnt get it to work "their way"?
Very puzzling. Poor journalism in my opinion.
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
Also, why does Sun waste all the effort on NetBeans? I'm sure it's a very capable IDE, but isn't nearly everyone else using Eclipse? Where would Java or Eclipse be if Sun put all the engineering time from NetBeans into a more useful project? I guess here I don't see the value of the competition as much...
Agile Artisans
> (Sun CEO) McNealy: We absolutely underhyped [Java].
Uh, Scott; that's not the way the rest of us remember it.
Yep, it's been 10 years since Java was officially introduced. It should come as no surprise that I was being turned down for jobs 2 years ago because the jobs in question required 10 years of Java experience. (And 5 years of C#/.NET experience as well. And I think at least one required post-doctoral work in Physics, Astrology, and Film.)
FYi, parent is trolling. There's no such quote in the article.
1. Kudos to the Groovy authors. They've even garnered James Gosling's attention. If you write Java code and consider yourself even a little bit of a forward thinker, look up Groovy. It's a very important JSR (JSR-241 specifically).
2. He talks about Javascript solely from the point of view of the browser. Yes, I agree that Javascript is predominently implemented in a browser, but it's reach can be felt everywhere. Javascript == ActionScript (Flash scripting language). Javascript == CFScript (ColdFusion scripting language). Javascript object notation == Python object notation.
But what about Javascript and Rhino's inclusion in Java 6? I've been using Rhino as a server side language for a while now because Struts is way too verbose for my taste. I just want a thin glue layer between the web interface and my java components. I'm sick and tired of endless xml configuration (that means you, too, EJB!). A Rhino script on the server (with embedded Request, Response, Application, and Session objects) is the perfect glue that does not need xml configuration. (See also Groovy's Groovlets for a thin glue layer).
3. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. Javascript (via Rhino) will be included in Java 6. I also read that Java 6 will allow access to the parse trees created by the javac compiler (same link as Java 6 above).
Java is now Lisp? Paul Graham writes about 9 features that made Lisp unique when it debuted in the 50s. Access to the parse trees is one of the most advanced features of Lisp. He argues that when a language has all 9 features (and Java today is at about #5), you've not created a new language but a dialect of Lisp.
I am a Very Big Fan of dynamic languages that can flex like a pretzel to fit my problem domain. Is Java evolving to be that pretzel?
FTi, parent has no sense of humor. Don't invite him to your party.
Netbeans is so cool. It has completely shed its molassas past, and is now an example of what can be great about Swing applications.
FYI, grandparent should have been modded informative and parent modded funny.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
"I knew it was slow, but I figured computer power would eventually catch-up and run things at a reasonable speed. It appears I was wrong."
On the 10th anniversary of Java - a joke that was out of date 5 years ago. (And, I remember the same thing being said about C++ 20 years ago).
Psssst.... "James", not "Josh".
tard.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
From TFA:
This is nit-picking, I know, but I was under the impression that scripting languages were actually defined by the presence of an actively-running interpreter during execution, making it possible to, e.g., construct and execute statements at runtime with things like PHP's exec() or Lua's do(file|string) functions (see: http://www.lua.org/pil/8.html for discussion on dofile and Lua's status as a scripting language). I wasn't aware that capability for rapid prototyping or language speed had anything to do with it.
Taking that into consideration, then, would Java with JIT qualify as an interpreted or compiled language? I'm not sure, myself---any thoughts?
That aside, a solid interview. Java looks to be pretty interesting; though in its current form it does bug the hell out of me (System.out.println()? Yeah, yeah, OO, but come on, three nested levels of scope just to get to a command line?), its progress has been impressive, and it's an innovative idea.
Unfortuately things can happen like a GC cycle at a bad time that can cause annoying slowdowns at the worst moment.
As Java is now used in real-time control applications, that is certainly avoidable.
bloated: the java class libraries are huge and so deploying a java environment (and you can't assume a decent java system will already be installed by default) is a huge undertaking
Not really. Java can be installed as a single rpm or tgz. Its over 10 mb, but given the size of a CD-ROM, or broadband download speeds, that is hardly a 'huge undertaking'.
and who would seriously wan't to release thier software as java bytecode when jad is arround?
There are plenty of bytecode obfuscators around.
He might forget stuff just like anyone else.
His java books are probably being used as doorstops.
Jython has been stable for years now, and is a much better-designed language than groovy appears likely to become. Where'sthe love?
Me neither - I've never gozzled.
It's been ten years since the official introduction of Java
And the damn thing still hasn't finished loading.
So in 15 years Java will be fast? w00t!
Nobody writes Java with Vim or even Emacs JDE for very long. The productivity increase a real IDE like Eclipse provides is phenomenal. System.out.println is 6 or so characters of typing with code completion. (But the real win is being able to do things like say "show me all the places my constructor is invoked." Text searching isn't good enough when you have a million-line project.)
So you're executing script in a JVM?
Gosling: Yeah. All the Java libraries are available to things written in Groovy. And Java applications can use Groovy. They can incorporate Groovy scriptlets.
Scriptable Java! Why wasn't I informed?!? 0__0
Does anybody have any practical experience/advice using Groovy in a production environment?
>>the fact that languages like java allow poor coders to produce code that kind of works rather than total failures probablly doesn't help the languages reputation either.>> As opposed to C++, which really separates the men from the boys when it fails totally transparently due to a pointer error several years after the product has shipped, resulting in 100,000 boxes getting owned. Good thing seg faults have long since chased all of the non-serious developers away from the language, so we have only our l33t hackers creating buffer overruns for our other l33t hackers to patch. >>and who would seriously wan't to release thier software as java bytecode when jad is arround?[sic]>> I'd imagine anyone who is big enough on open software to winge about not having a free-as-in-speech runtime environment (despite having free-as-in-beer ones readily available) wouldn't be too worried about the possibility of someone seeing, gasp, their source code.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
If you're a typical corporate CTO, you know that you will have no shortage of either Java or .NET developers for the next 10 years or so, which means those are going to be the most important candidates for just about any project you're considering.
Yes, Java is slower to run than C++. However Java is faster to write than C++; and I think that's the real issue.
In terms of power of expressivity, I think they're about the same, but I find Java easier to read than C++, and I find that mid-level programmers make far fewer subtle "shoot yourself in the foot" mistakes in Java than they do in C++. The run-time array bounds checking, lack of pointers, checked exceptions, and the lovely NullPointerException serve to keep a lot of people out of trouble. The embarrassing wealth of pre-written, tested, free, source-available modules Java has, over the reinvent-the-wheel approach of C++ goes a long way in improved programmer productivity. Here's a test for you: have one of your middle-skilled programmers do some network communication in Java and C++ and see which program takes less time to write and works better.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So in 15 years Java will be fast? w00t!
You seem to have either misunderstood the term 'out of date', or have got your sense of time mixed up after reading the earlier '100 Years of Special Relativity' topic.
how to make the JVM start up in less than 2 minutes.
More likely driven by competition against MS.
.net "framework", their IDE and tools, their database, their webserver, their OS, etc. etc. and managers say you can't go wrong with that.
.net stuff seems less because something like JEE (J2EE) has a lot of little bits that are highly more configurable than in the MS world.
MS is a one stop shop. You get their
On the other hand, the complexity of some of the
I'm sure that's it because that's the type of feedback they've received from a lot of big companies (including the one I work in) and they are trying to make things easier.
That's why they have been working some much on Netbeans and EJB 3.0.
- sigs are for wimps.
Don't worry. Binary XML will soak up far more compute cycles that CPU developers can possibly invent over the next 10 years.
I think the biggest selling point of Java was the cross-platform compatibility. However, 10 years later, I think that it is clear that this promise was largely a fraud. Java was a perhaps a good new platform for writing enterprise applications and applications for certain consumer niches for those developers who didn't want to deal with the unsafe languages like C or C++ or those who were fooled by Sun into believing that Java is the best thing since whatever, but cross-platform compatibility for large applications still remains problematic. For example, most vendors of fairly complex java applications I have seen, not only require you to use a certain version of OS and a web browser (if that's an applet) but also they demand a certain version of the java virtual machine is used and with certain patches on some operating systems. And if you don't meet their requirements, you often run into problems. I bet a python or a perl script would have fared much better in many of those settings as far as portability is concerned.
Why does this poor excuse for an interview get on slashdot, when my submitted story on Java Penis Pumps got rejected?
Maybe its the competetion from C#/ Open java (jcg), or the fact that the java programmers seem to be listening to developers http://www.java.net/ . Or maybe its eclipse which is a great ide. It seems java development is picking up steam of late. More people I know are now doing java than c , and thats a good change (&*&*&**&&*&!!!).
(And, I remember the same thing being said about C++ 20 years ago).
There is a slight problem with your logic. 20 years ago C++ was barely a toddler. Nobody used it and it was not generally known to the public.
Java on the other hand is 14 years old and people are still talking about its slowness.
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
Doesn't that say something to you?
Uh, are you serious?
You're proably stretching the meaning of the word "real time". Components are probably written in Java, but the interrupt control or tight loop governing the "real time" aspects are probably written in another language.
Nice try, though.
Oh, if only 1/16 of the people here got that joke.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
There is a slight problem with your logic. 20 years ago C++ was barely a toddler. Nobody used it and it was not generally known to the public.
Nonsense. I was using C++ for development in 1985, as were many others. The c-front translator for C to C++ was released in 1983.
Since when has widespread use of a language been any measure of its performance?
Java on the other hand is 14 years old and people are still talking about its slowness.
Yes, because those who object to it not being open-source have a political agenda to rubbish it. Those of us who actually use it realise this talk is meaningless.
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
Doesn't that say something to you?
Yes, it shows that a lot of developers have a reactionary attitude, and it takes them a long time to adopt new technologies.
It took a long time before developers realised that this 'new-fangled' object oriented C++ could match the speed of C. Meanwhile, some of us had been using it for years.
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
That's not how I remember it. I remember in 1996-1997 people were scoffing at C++ because it was "slower than C".
My bad, I was thinking you said that joke was starting to be told 5 years ago, not out of date at that point. Anyway, smite me oh mighty smiter for such a lame attempt at a joke.
But they seem to have figured out a couple decent uses for Java eventually.
It doesn't have to be that way, but it's not the holy grail that Sun made it out to be, either.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Most of my experiences with Java is that programs either barf runtime exceptions like crazy or exceptions get silently caught and not handled at all.
Think of the horror of C or C++ programs that had the same bugs but did not throw the exceptions. (I remember developing with C++ in the 80s on MSDOS, and in place of runtime exceptions we got random graphics on the screen, or software jams). Give me Java any day.
There are other attacks, but most of the "exploits" are due to a buffer overflow (90% of all exploits? 95%?). Heck, if I'm am not mistaken it was a buffer overflow that put an end to the "x years without a hole in the default OpenBSD install" slogan :(
Now how many buffer overflow did happen in the JVM in the last 10 years?
I think the answer is zero. And if it's not zero, it's only some implementation of the JVM that was at fault.
For me it's all about the sandbox. Java, Jython, Groovy, you-name-it... I don't care. As long as it targets the JVM. It's tried, lean, mean, rock solid technology. You just ain't escaping it.
In TFA (yup, I did read it), Gosling says that "The only serious divide is they (C# / .Net) have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode."
That's a good principle to believe in.
How long were /. types calling OpenSolaris vaporware? :P You of all people should know that lack of public release does not equate lack of progress.
At least with Jython you can check the cvs log and see that commits are indeed happening.
slow: slow to start definately, slow in actual code speed no. Unfortuately things can happen like a GC cycle at a bad time that can cause annoying slowdowns at the worst moment
Sure its slow to start because ther is a 2nd process. But Java 1.5 addresses this to some degree. As for inconvient GC cycles, that is the programmers fault. You have to do your own GC when you think you have time. The JVM will only GC when its full...
bloated: the java class libraries are huge and so deploying a java environment (and you can't assume a decent java system will already be installed by default) is a huge undertaking
False.
NOT FREE: well there are free jvms but there is still catching up to do and as they get better they will undoubtablly suffer the same issue as wine, most stuff will work but there will be slight differences that fuck over some apps.
You mean like Microsoft tried?
the fact that languages like java allow poor coders to produce code that kind of works rather than total failures probablly doesn't help the languages reputation either.
Troll.
Past: was proimising
Present: is confusing
Future: will end up a different animal of wha ti s is now.
Unfortunately, it's like trying to run C++ programs through an interpreter on a machine at 3/4 of the power of the one you're using instead of actually compiling and tweaking it for maximum speed and efficiency.
If you ran some actual benchmarks (with modern Java) you will find you are mistaken. Modern Java VMs include an optimiser that tweaks the machine code for speed and efficiency just as you describe. Last year, a set of benchmarks for numerical computation showed Java within 4-5% of optimised C code.
I use Java apps at work and they are often slow and ponderous compared to similar apps written the normal way in C++
The reason for this is usually that some organisations are very slow at upgrading their Java. Java 1.5 was released last year and is generally acknowledged to be fast, both in terms of general performance and GUI speed. Many companies are still using Java 1.3, which is very old.
Everytime java is discussed on slashdot, I'm amazed at how some junior leaguers try to dismiss it because they can point out one application where java is a poor choice.
There are some applications where it does not make sense to implement in java. However, I say that java is a great choice for the top layer of a web application server stack. There are a lot of web apps that take the form of:
1. Gather data from one or more databases.
2. Perform some consolidation and express the output in html.
In this example, java is a consolidator of data from disparate data sources. It needs to hang on to several network connections and do some simple IO but it does not need to burn the CPU at 100% because it spends most of it's time blocked on IO. Java is a great choice for applications like this because there is a very large and active community working to make java dynamic web serving better and better. Every year your organization can, for free, upgrade to a new version of java and simple app server like Tomcat and reap the rewards of the communities improvements. Also, in my experience with server applications, the promise of portability is real. I've ported from windows to solaris and then to linux without changing the java application.
Java's catching up on the type safety, but I swear that the language should forbid empty catch blocks. At least force the programmer to output something FFS!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
1983 is nothing -- a pretty good C to C++ translator has been included with every Unix since the 70's. They call it "cat".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The "barfing runtime exceptions" was exactly my point. It's not only a red flag for badly written code, it's a built-in QC test. I'm TIRED of reading other people's code and having to go back to them and say "O.K., this (really arcane thing that you never will understand) might/probably will happen, and so therefore I can't put you code into production". All them "barfed runtime exceptions" make my argument for me. I can simply fiat "no unhandled exceptions" and leave it at that.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Hell, in 2005 people still scoff at C++ for being "bloated" or "slow", just like people scoff at Java for being "slow".
In reality, C++ is often faster than C, and Java is plenty capable of handling 90% or more of what until recently has been C's exclusive purview.
That said, I still prefer LISP.
"Java on the other hand is 14 years old and people are still talking about its slowness.
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
Doesn't that say something to you?"
Yes, it says that there are plenty of ill informed bigots out there who say such things because they just dont like Java.
You do realize that your code is really sick because the child inserts the penis into their own butthole, right?
So not only were you not funny, but your code was wrong.
Sad. Truly sad.
you moron ....variable name can't start with an underscore ('_') in java. your code won't compile.
In terms of power of expressivity, I think they're about the same, but I find Java easier to read than C++
Sure, new Matrix(A.negate().multipliedBy(C)).addedTo(D) is so much clearer than -A*C + B...
My website
The better IDEs will at least bitch about this, if you tell them to, but I agree with you in principle. I like checked exceptions, and I think it's one of C#'s biggest failings. I know this puts me in the minority. I don't care.
From your parent: > ......"Give me Java any day."
Yeah. I think it's today's best "Old Man's Language". For those of us old enough to have "been there, done that, got the T-shirt", I think Java is the best for keeping the Too Clever Kids (and yes, of course I was one, too) out of trouble.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Java is very important in the research community. I have been a grad student for past 3-4-5 yrs (..have lost count by now :) but I have never used any language other than Java for my projects/experiments . Be it simulation requiring a Knowledgebase of million RDF triples or be it a Medical Imaging Software to be used by Physicians.. it does it all.
Somehow 'application researchers' like me are fascinated by the extent of its use.. (drawing nice GUIs or plotting graph with existing Jars)
With regards to question of scaling..lately companies like IBM have been working towards creating optimized JIT compilers for Java.. I had benchmarked one during my internship at IBM Research.. and it gave nearly similar performance to native C/C++ apps.
The run-time array bounds checking, lack of pointers, checked exceptions, and the lovely NullPointerException serve to keep a lot of people out of trouble.
Can you spot a problem with your reasoning, here? Here's a free clue: Java does have pointers. Here's another clue: Java is a pass by value language, same as C.
I don't think so. Sun mistakenly named the exception NullPointerException instead of NullReferenceException (which MS corrected in .NET).
Java uses references -- not pointers. Hell, even the implementation of references in some VMs is handle rather than pointer based.
As I was searching for some info about JBuilder, I stumbled across this juicy bit that I had not seen before.
a d_id=34246
Borland announces JBuilder Roadmap; future will be Eclipse-based
The jist of the story is that in the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based !!!
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thre
below is much of the article text in case it gets swamped.
Borland has announced their technical roadmap for JBuilder. Later this year Borland will ship JBuilder 2006 which will add shared code and shared debugging features. In the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based and add better dependency analysis features.
The shared code and debugging will allow developers in different locations to participate in shared coding and debugging, as though they were sitting down together in the same room.
The Eclipse news follows up from their February announcement of joining the Eclipse board and their intention to re-build their entire application life cycle management product suite on top of Eclipse. Borland sees Eclipse as an integration framework upon which they will be building JBuilder as well as their other products. By leveraging Eclipse, they can realize the cost savings of not having to worry about maintaining IDE functionality, and integration with other Borland tools, as well as gaining a larger audiece via Eclipse and benefitting from the large ecosystem of Eclipse tools.
According to Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland, the major new addition planned for Peloton will be a dependency analysis feature. It will be able to understand the dependencies between different artifacts in the project, such as the link between JSP's and struts controllers, EJB's and the persistence tier, without the user needing to configure these explicitly or switch views. Debugging will be improved - stepping into different tiers will be easier without end users needing to manually set additional breakpoints.
Code-name Peloton comes from a cycling metaphor, which is used to describe a group of cyclists who can ride faster together than they could individually, reflecting Borland's emphasis on team collabortation features in JBuilder.
Borland has not announced any pricing information, but they are looking into offering a separate 'distribution' of JBuilder on Eclipse all integrated to make it easy for corporate clients to deploy.
Borland chose Eclipse over Netbeans after watching industry momentum and listening to customers who think Eclipse will be their next major platform.
When asked about what their differentiators for JBuilder-Eclipse over Websphere Studio will be, Borland responded that WS Studio is focused on Websphere, whereas JBuilder supports multiple application server platforms.
Luis De La Rosa in his 2005 predictions suggested that Eclipse will become the Java community's answer to Visual Studio.NET, as a de facto IDE; this being a good thing for the Java community, as Eclipse will help build a market/ecosystem for development tools much like Visual Basic, which is the real goal that Sun wants to reach: 10 million developers using Java.
Borland's decision to join IBM in basing their IDE on Eclipse is certainly bringing us closer to that prediction! What do you think?
where do you get those numbers?
/ ide_marketshare.html
A quick search I did came up with very different numbers.
Eclipse - 45%
JBuilder - 16%
IDEA IntelliJ - 10%
netbeans was well below, at around 6-8%, hard to tell from the graph.
all others combined (including netbeans) make up less than 30%
In the light of the recent news that JBuilder is merging code with eclipse, I think netbeans is quite doomed !
here is the survey:
http://www.qa-systems.com/products/qstudioforjava
I don't think so. Sun mistakenly named the exception NullPointerException instead of NullReferenceException (which MS corrected in .NET).
Java uses references -- not pointers. Hell, even the implementation of references in some VMs is handle rather than pointer based.
Java calls its pointers references. No, they aren't identical in functionality to pointers in C (e.g., you can't do arithmetic on them), but they are still pointers. Nothing in the C standard prevents an implementation from implementing pointers with handles, either.
Free-as-in-beer for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Some of us like to have long uptimes. Once Sun sanctions and offers for download on its web site JVMs for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, THEN you can claim they're "readily available".
I disagree. You can't just write an inefficient program and hope that advances in hardware make up for it.
I think Java's biggest problem is the lack of a good garbage collector. I saw a program where the programmers had put a tiny memory display in the bottom left corner of the screen. At first it was OK, hovering around 100 megs, but as we kept using it, the memory usage would increase as needed, but it would never free it after it was done with it. Within 10 minutes, the thing had occupied all 512 megabytes of that computer's RAM and nearly crashed the system.
There is also a non-Java alternative to this program which has less features, and a CLI instead of a fancy GUI, but at least it doesn't need two Gigs of RAM to run. Personally, I prefer the non-Java one.
Or maybe a bunch of us still complain about Java's slowness because it _is_ slow if you don't happen to be running it on a Windows box.
What's the point of a "platform-independent platform" if it's really only meant to run well on one platform?
Gosling is one of the world's biggest asses. His ass is so big, it accounts for over 80% of his face. If there was any justice in the world, he would be known as "James Assling". Mainly because he is an ass.
My last name is Goslinga....
Yes, because those who object to it not being open-source have a political agenda to rubbish it.
.NET
Really? You think that's why it is?
Odd, I wouldn't have expected those with a political agenda for open-source to be so enthusiastic about
why do you bother to open if your mouth if only shit falls out?
They entirely overhyped it in areas where it's relatively useless (the desktop) and entirely underhyped it in areas where it's extremely useful (backend and embedded areas).
Now ten years later you talk about "java" and all anyone remembers are those horrible, sluggish AWT applets, running on netscape 4.0's broken JVM, which they used during the initial Java hype push. But almost nobody these days knows about the success Java met in unglamorous areas after the hype push had died off.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"As Java is now used in real-time control applications, that is certainly avoidable."
Yes there is a "real-time" version of Java, but it's not appropriate for use just to avoid the GC. The reason why real-time Java works is a real-time thread has priority above the GC and rea-time applicatons will use "imortal" memory that will *not* be GC'd. In other words when writing real-time applications you use the equivalent of malloc/free.
Well you have to stop thinking for about one minute and 97 seconds before you fire up the command to start the JVM...
A shitty C program vs. a C++ program that is well thought out, sure, C++ wins. If the C++ guy is careless and the C guy is worth his salt, C wins. If both the C++ and C guys each know what they're doing, you'd come out about even.
The languages are too similar to make this comparison. It just doesn't make sense.
Use C++ like it knows what it's doing instead of fighting the language.
Use smart reference-counted pointers, const correctness, exception safety guarantees, the STL, and proper object-oriented programming to make it all possible, and it's fairly difficult or next to impossible to run into buffer overflows, double-free errors, memory leaks, and other traditional C errors.
Try to program in C like a petulant child because your boss is forcing you to use C++, and yeah, everything you said is true.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
[Yes, because those who object to it not being open-source have a political agenda to rubbish it.]
Really? You think that's why it is?
Yes. I have been following this for years, and that is the only reason I have been able to come up with.
Odd, I wouldn't have expected those with a political agenda for open-source to be so enthusiastic about
Me neither.
Or maybe a bunch of us still complain about Java's slowness because it _is_ slow if you don't happen to be running it on a Windows box.
What's the point of a "platform-independent platform" if it's really only meant to run well on one platform?
Interesting. None of the current benchmarks of Java performance show that it is slow on Linux, for example, as compared with Windows. Indeed, IBM's Linux VMs routinely rate as some of the fastest Java implementations.
Perhaps you could provide some code and benchmarks to illustrate the supposed slowness on Linux as compared to Windows?
Both languages are Turing complete, they are equally expressive.
Java may "have no pointers" but the pointer semantics is still there.
So we measure everything by how well it runs on linux? Wake me up in 10 years when that might matter more.
It's a good language. Not a great language, but an good one. Which is good enough.
The Java libraries range from mediocre to terrible, but that's a separate issue.
Thanks for grabbing more accurate numbers, I'm not sure where I got the Netbeans numbers from, I might have mixed them up with another IDE :) Regardless, JBuilder is crap, Eclipse is good but when compared to Netbeans, Eclipse looks like crap. My company was kind of standardized on Eclipse for god knows how long, but they always have let developers choose any IDE they want (just most used to choose Eclipse). In the past 3 or 4 months I've seen a lot of developers switching to NetBeans. I used to be an eclipse fan boy, but NetBeans really made a huge turn around from its old crappy self. It is literally years past Eclipse now. If word spreads enough about it, I can be pretty sure it'll beat any competition. If you've never used NetBeans please go give it a shot. I still use eclipse all the time in a mixed envrionment with NetBeans, simply because our dev environment has some custom eclipse stuff that we wrote that makes certain things easier. Eclipse is crap unless you just want basic editing capabilites with code completion, etc.. I know lots of folks who write java code using vim or jedit, I do myself sometimes. If you like writing java code in tools like vim, then you probably like the grunt work stuff and eclipse will be great for you. However, an IDE can be much more then what Eclipse provides and I didn't really realize that until recently when I started finding out all this great functionality that NetBeans has.
Regards,
Steve
you can't overload the * operator.
check your speling
Oh noes! I hates Java games!
Yes you can... both the unary (*A - that's how smart pointers usually work) and the binary (that's how complex numbers usually work) versions.
My website
Six characters long? It's three in Emacs (sop) with abbrevations.
Code completion, I have found, is slower than knowing what the hell you are typing. And if you DO know what the hell you are typing, then code completion actually sucks quite hard because it interrupts you while you are typing something.
Eclipse is nice for some things, I like the auto-fixes and sometimes load code into Eclipse after I've spent a while actually writing in Emacs. But for actual code creation I still find Emacs to be a lot quicker because of its overall flexibility in a task at hand, between macros and abbreviations and user-defined functions.
As for that cool trick of "show me all the places my constructor is invoked" - well that's what the JDE Cross Referencer is for:
JDE includes a facility for creating and utilizing a cross-referencing database to enable you to quickly locate all the callers of any particular function. This functionality is very useful for quickly figuring how unfamiliar code works, and useful for doing certain tasks such as renaming functions. Be advised that this only finds direct callers, and cannot detect calls via Java's reflection mechanism. The cross-reference database must be kept in sync with the project code, however the database generation is generally quick. The remainder of this section explains how to configure and use the cross-referencer.
(from the JDE Users Guide)
Of course Eclipse has the same liability about not finding callers that are really invoking a constructor dynmically which is why people don't end up using such features all that much.
Eclipse is the way of the future though, it's nice to see a really strong generic IDE platform develop. I have no doubt someday some clever person will embed a fully functional Java version of the Emacs editor (no the keybindings alone are not enough) in Eclipse and then I'll be all set.
People who use IntelliJ seem to like it a lot better though, I have to say.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
C++ was 14 around 1997 and was widely used and known for its high performance.
Doesn't that say something to you?
Yes, that does say something to me. It tells me that people very much like to stick to first impressions. Granted, those horrible applets from the dark ages of Java haven't done the language much good, but I would definitely not consider a decent, well-written piece of Java software to be slow.
Show me a recently written piece of slow Java code, and I'll show you a programmer who should be looking for a new job. Think Burger King.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
No, that's not the way modern JVMs work. The whole "out-of-memory, stop the world for a GC" way of thinking was archaic before Java was even a gleam in Gosling's eye.
Granted, the programmer can do silly things that cause the system to perform badly, but this is not the fault of the garbage collector.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
The technology has faced numerous challenges over the last decade
Yes, like the fact that the original Java language spec was full of bugs. Problems like lack of reflection and errors in the type system (e.g., array), plus numerous security bugs, were just unforgivable.
Another obstacle was that Sun lied about what they were going to do with Java. They promised an ISO/ANSI/ECMA standardization, but instead, they kept it proprietary.
Gosling: The only serious divide is they have this unsafe mode which they use a lot. One of the principles I believe in is there shouldn't be an unsafe mode.
General purpose programming languages need an "unsafe" mode, and Java itself has one: it's called JNI. It's widely used, by Sun, by Eclipse, and by many other projects. How does Java's unsafe mode compare to C#'s "unsafe" mode? Java's unsafe mode sucks: because JNI relies on C or C++, it is not just unsafe, it is highly dangerous, and it requires recompilation between machines. With C#, you can tightly limit unsafe code to just the statements where it is needed, often just a single statement, with everything else in the unsafe module being as safe as pure Java. That is much preferable to having to code the same module entirely in C or C++.
Even in so called "pure" Java, you can screw yourself: write a ".so" file, then load it. You could implement C#'s unsafe that way if you wanted to, with runtime code generation. So, even so-called "pure" Java is as "unsafe" as C# because you can do the same things in it if you are willing to invest the effort.
What Gosling fails to understand is that the purpose of runtime safety is not to keep the programmer from doing something bad at all cost, it is to make it hard to do something bad accidentally. C#, just like Java, keeps the programmer from doing something bad accidentally, and C#, just like Java, gives applications themselves control over the safety of the modules they are willing to load.
I think Gosling should be kept far away from language or systems design. Gosling's major software systems (Gosling's Emacs, NeWS, and Java) all initially had grave design flaws and awful performance. With many of his systems, he demonstrated hostility towards notions of free and/or open source software (NeWS was meant to kill X11, and with Java, Sun misled people). The only reason Java eventually succeeded was because lots of people invested a lot of time and effort to fix up the mess that Gosling had created.
Java should be great, but it isn't. For all the 'writeonce, run anywhere' gumpf that the marketing department came up with it failed in the most important test: usability. I can code pretty well in most languages, but as I work with Java, and was trained in Java at Uni, its the language I think most clearly in... unfortunately.
The fact is I can code a quick app in Java on my Mac, compile and send it my Dad on his Wintel and he won't have a clue what to do with it. I then have to spend 5 minutes on the phone explaining either how to install the JRE, or how to run it from the CLI. Whats worse is that once its running, it looks like I can't code, as Java, by default runs noticably slower as you wait for the JRE to bootstrap and then for the JIT to get all the important bits compiled. Why would I do that to myself?
Java is a great concept. But it has systematically failed on the desktop. What I want is a write once, compile anywhere. Same scenario, I want to have a compiler that I can target a Wintel platform from my mac and just send my dad the executable or installer, so all he has to do is double click - like he would any other app, and it run as well as a VB app (ie a little slower than native is fine). I would keep a few things from Java. I love GC for quick hack apps, fine grained memeory management has its place, but you can often feel like you reinventing the wheel, and its a gapping whole for the script kiddies to drive their payload through. I also love the central API. I can see the purists arguing against exceptions, but they do make debugging very easy, and they're not that expensive really. I also like the ease you can do threads. I don't like the GUI performance or the end user experience.
If MS isn't going to play ball, and support various runtime environments from a fresh install, or if Java continue on insisting on a 20MB JRE download I can't see anyway around the byte code problem except to distribute binaries. Qt is a good start. Mono and C# are good candidates, but to be honest I'd be tempted to take Java, bolt Qt onto it, and use GCC to create targeted binaries. Is that out of the question?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
well, to each their own.
:)
my company however, switched from netbeans to jbuilder, because of the vast increase in productivity due to a larger amount of functionality.
Given that netbeans is less than 8% market share (by those numbers) and is DECREASING in market share (from what I read, only Eclipse is increasing in market share) I suspect it is only time before it has such a small audience that IBM considers dropping it. Hopefully they wont but you never know.
Given that eclipse + jbuilder is already over 50%, when JBuilder officially integrates Eclipse code in 2006, I predict they will grow even faster.
Besides... Remember Betamax. Even if netbeans was better, that doesnt mean it will win... marketing is king in business
You are smited.... not only for being an ignorant ass who doesn't have the barest semblance of an idea of the speed of modern Java, but alofor being someone who thinks he's a comedian when he isn't.
Of course, it really depends what you're trying to do and who wrote the code.
Throw java at a large numerical problem and watch it suck really really badly compared to C or Fortran. And don't get me started on trying to hook it up to numerical libraries.
However on most application like problems rather than scientific applications it doesn't do badly.
Now factor in the fact that java si being taught to everybody and his dog and is starting to suffer from VBisms as a result, and you may find that while its possible to write good java code which is competetive with C, the average java code is probably beaten by the average C code for a task.
who the fuck are you?
Nah, unless you run Windows on a Cray, it still sucks ass.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Huh? The terms "reference" and "pointer" mean the same thing in Java. It is the address of an object.
On, say, a 32-bit machine, the reference to an object is the exact same 4-byte value - the same size, shape, and numerical value as a pointer in C.
If you disassemble the machine code produced by Sun's JVM, object references go in registers and are dereferenced using the exact same instructions as what a C compiler produces.
Indeed a problem for garbage collectors, luckily Java ships with several different algorithms. The one used by default (full halt for a step in generational GC) has the best throughput.
If you are more worried about short pauses you have two other alternatives however. The concurrent low pause pause collector will halt the application threads only in some phases of the collection, it is activated with the -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC flag (or system property). It does work in a different thread, so it is a good bet if you have multiple processors especially. The other option is the incremenetal collector, -Xincgc, which will do minor collections in parts with application threads getting to run between the steps (causing the pause to be spread out).
Another notable option in these multicore days is -XX:+UseParallelGC, which will launch several GC threads and do some of the work in parallel.
Overall there is a lot of opportunity to tune the Java garbage collector, google about on it a bit, it has been shown quite feasible to make nice interactive experience with Java (Jake2 anyone?). If even better guarantees are needed however it is probably best to look at one of the realtime JVM's. There are a variety available.
Huh? The terms "reference" and "pointer" mean the same thing in Java. It is the address of an object.
On, say, a 32-bit machine, the reference to an object is the exact same 4-byte value - the same size, shape, and numerical value as a pointer in C.
If you disassemble the machine code produced by Sun's JVM, object references go in registers and are dereferenced using the exact same instructions as what a C compiler produces.
Nope. Java spec doesn't dictate the implementation of references and they in fact don't have to be implemented as pointers -- like I said, some VMs use handles. Hell, an interpretor could use a hashtable even. There is no restriction because references can't be treated like pointers (used as to access object memory by address).
Nothing in the C standard prevents an implementation from implementing pointers with handles, either.
Everything about C prevents pointers from being implemented as handles.
A pointer is expected to be just that, a pointer (not a reference to an abstract idea like an object).
A C program expects (char pointer + 1) to be the next byte in memory. (char handle + 1) will not be the next byte in memory.
Please explain how an implementation of C using handles instead of pointers could work with this valid C program:
char c;
char *cp = strstr("abc");
int x;
x = (int)cp;
x++;
c = (*(char *cp)x);
slow garbage collection? the demo at Java One on the real time jvm that is used to control the airplane made by Boeing shows that even garbage collection can be tightly controlled.
.net equivalent I gather.
Bloated? the windows international 5.0 jvm is a 15MB down only. For something that powerful this is really incredibly small. And it is much smaller than the
Not free? There are many implementations of the jvm from many vendors. BEA for examples has its own JVM that runs on multiple OSes. Their latest one will even run on Intel directly on the metal. IBM has its jvm. Many other do. And all of these are compatible. The only problem to date has been having a gnu jvm. There are a few, and they are a little behind: not surprising given the speed at which things have been moving in java, and the amount of investment it has received. But recently sun has backed one open source jvm at apache. Also I think Sun is open sourcing their own jvm...
GrandGrandparent: troll, there's not the word 'slow' in the article.
GrandParent: informative
Parent: troll
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Eclipse.
Azureus.
jEdit.
If you think these apps aren't slow, you're being fooled by just how fast modern CPUs are. Run them side-by-side with larger apps and watch the horror.
"I like checked exceptions, and I think it's one of C#'s biggest failings."
Why single out C#? No language other than Java has checked exceptions.
Eclipse - the slowest machine I'm running it on is a Pentium III - 500 Mhz (Windows 2000, 512Mb ram), indeed not the fastest machine around, but the application is definitely not slow when working on my projects (large projects, I might add, no helloworld 1 classamathingies).
Azureus - I'm running Azureus at home on my old Pentium 1 - 133Mhz (Windows 2000, 48Mb ram) and it works like a charm. If it runs visually fast on THAT machine, it's FAST.
I never use jEdit, so I cannot comment on that.
Java applications can be slow (think JDeveloper by Oracle for example), but that's not the fault of the language. Repeat after me: if a Java application seems slow, it's almost always the fault of the programmer's lack of knowledge of the language.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
Throw java at a large numerical problem and watch it suck really really badly compared to C or Fortran.
On the contrary; I have found that the IBM Linux VM can actually out-perform optimised gcc-compiled C on numerical work.
A major study last year showed that Sun's latest JDK (5.0) was within 4-5% of good optimising C++ compilers running the Linpack benchmark.
I've never gozzled, too. But my roomies say it hurts the first time.
Just a bunch of silly slashdotters whining about something they don't really know anything about. Like a bunch of old women complaining about things that are no longer relevent or applicable (no longer is about 5 years). Good grief, you morons sound like my mother.
Go back to php loosers!
Sure, new Matrix(A.negate().multipliedBy(C)).addedTo(D) is so much clearer than -A*C + B...
The problem is that "-", "*" become ambiguous in c++. In java you could at least say:
a.crossProd(b), or a.dotProd(b).. But if you're looking at a * b in c++ for the first time, which is it?
The ambiguity problem continues into the non numeric examples as well. Thus, w/ heavy use of over-loading, c++ becomes actually harder to understand.
-Michael
There is no reason why a JVM couldn't release memory that isn't needed anymore to the OS. However, since memory resources are always in a state of flux with Java, the likelihood that hitting such a high water mark again will occur is high, so it generally isn't worth doing. Java only claims extra memory from the OS IF the programmer was dumb enough to hang on to too much memory.. This is a notorious problem with Java programmers.. They think it's too expensive to construct new objects, so they cache them ALL. Even the stupidest little ones like lists of data. So each of the thousands of classes each holds on to little caches of data, which point to other caches of data, bla bla bla. The end result is that the GC winds up doing 2 or three full sweeps and doesn't recover enough memory, so it asks the OS for more..
The way it's supposed to work is that object allocation is embarrasingly fast (compared to most other architectures), so you allocate what you need and release it as soon as you don't need it. You have thousands of very fast mini-garbage collections this way, and never get above a 32Meg foot-print. (Yes, I know 32Meg is large compared to say perl). I often run full web applications that never grow to more than 32Meg.. However, when doing full caching DB's I grow to over a gig in size. But the performance is worth it in that case. It's only when some thread-locals dont' release their wears that I find memory "leaks", which aren't really leaks, since the next time that thread is re-used, that memory will be freed and thereby recovered.. In the mean time slow (2 second) full GCs need to be performed. But it's still bad programmer design, not the VM itself. A c program written in the same way would leak just as badly, and lets not forget the propensity of c++ programs to never even free objects it's not done with.
-Michael
I never really bought the "social skills" bunk. I think chitchat and small talk is useless and stupid so I usually don't engage in it. Does this mean I don't have "social skills"? As long as you are articulate, and unless you are in public relations, fuck "social skills".
Stereotypical pseudo-rational geek attitude.
The inconsequential "chitchat and small talk" are the manner in which we find out more about the person we're dealing with before things get more serious, allowing us to "feel our way round" when we are unsure. This may apply to both strangers and people we're currently unsure of; don't bring on the heavy stuff first. They're the manner in which we show respect by asking questions about the other person that may not *directly* involve the business we have with them; of course, this may open up opportunities we hadn't considered, possibly leading to friendship and/or greater business involvement.
Not everyone is equally good at this. Not everyone places equal importance on it. That's part of the healthy mix of personalities that push some people to work in public-facing jobs, and others to work in more "human-phobic" areas (such as the more technical aspects of computer hardware). It's okay to not be a "small talk" person, as you are.
On the other hand, to criticise it for being "useless" (because it doesn't serve any obvious purpose) smacks of blinkered short-sightedness and the kind of (phoney) rationalisation of their own behaviour that geeks like to indulge in.
Frankly, the kind of people who come out with this kind of stuff probably consider themselves "rational". Actually, that displays a laughable (and verging-on-the-autistic) lack of self-awareness. Geeks are no more "rational" than a lot of other people; they have their own neuroses and obsessions that are obvious when you take a step back. For example, to use the same surface "rationalisation", what purpose does being fanatical about "Star Trek", an entirely fictitious TV show serve? None. Surely it's more rational or logical (*) to live in the real world.
Of course, the fan will explain how it represents the problems of today's world in a semi-abstract manner, blah blah... the more insightful will mention that it provides an outlet for the geek personality type. Point is; if they are forced to explain it in depth, they'll put the effort into considering their own behaviour that they won't even waste considering anyone else's. (Although they won't explain it as an excuse to escape the real world or dress in fantasy costumes; that would be too close to the bone).
So, to get back to the point, your failure to even recognise the purpose of small talk (whether you like it or not) smacks of the most arrogant and deluded abuse of rationality to justify your own shortcomings and behaviour.
(*) Reminds me of a friend I had in my early teens who was into sci-fi, had a crap geeky sense-of-humour and an obsession with Spock and "logic". He was no more logical than anyone else; in fact, sometimes he was downright weird. In retrospect, I reckon he was (slightly) autistic in some form.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
FYI, the apppalllingly missnamedd 'Plain Old Text' alllows HTML as wellll (alllthough youu ddiddn"tt use anyy here), so youu shouldd probabababbbly use itt for mosstt of yourr possttssttss.
Butttt, mosssstttt importttantttttly: Preview, PREVEIW, PERVEWI!!!!
PSSPSS, ittt"s 'whine' inn the Westttrenn hemosfeer, and 'whinge' in eht Eatstrennn himesphre. Lirn howww too sple, dikcheda.
(The preceding is an example of how annoying posts such as yours are to those of us who are actually literate.)
That survey is almost almost 2 years old. A lot has changed in 2 years.
"The survey was taken over a 5 week period from last week of August to the end of September 2003."
Most JVM's today use a generational garbage collection algorithm based on the idea that most objects live only for a short time and that long-living objects are more likely to continue living. Such a scheme requires that the newly allocated objects get garbage-collected frequently.
Decent language - a few things could be better. However my company has been shipping production scientific software in JAVA in 21st century and making lots of money. It reduces the cost supporting different computer platfrms and has good GUI tools compared to C++ based products.
I was actually thinking about my Mac. I generally avoid Java on Linux for anything other than applets because I can get native programs that integrate better with my desktop and don't suck up all my RAM (my Linux box is aging).
JimmyGosling Then I think you are a little confused. I am going camping with this guy in a couple weeks and he is Absolutely not James Gosling. Maybe you mean someone else, but i doubt it. Anyway, good gor a laugh.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
I was actually thinking about my Mac.
Apple has always been rather behind in releasing Java versions.
However, I don't think 'Java is slow on the Mac' is the same as 'Java is slow on anything but Windows'....
1 and 3 are related. I agree that not having a decent integrated JSP editor bundled or available for free is a detriment. Then again, not everyone needs JSP editors.
;) I doubt 90+% of the java devs out there do either.
2. I don't see this as a negative.
5. Eclipse has had this since at least 3.0.
6. I prefer to pick and choose my Tomcat server version, thank you.
So, I see 2 items not freely available for Eclipse, and 1 of those is undesired by a large number of java devs.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
What is really funny is that the mods didn't realize "gosling" is also a term for "simpleton". By modding this down, they agreed that they are goslings too.
Hilarious post!
As for inconvient GC cycles, that is the programmers fault. You have to do your own GC when you think you have time.
Programmers are not supposed to manage garbage collection themselves :- Calling System.gc() explicitly can actually decrease performance and is not recommended.
JVMs even have a -XX:+DisableExplicitGC flag to allow system administrators to workaround code that mistakenly assumes calling System.gc will help performance.
- Setting all references to null after they are not used is also not necessary in many cases. For temporary objects, or local variables, setting unused reference to null won't improve GC at all, because memory is freed when the garbage collector is running, not as soon as the reference is set to null. It is only in long lived objects that it is important to set a reference to null when it is not useful anymore (otherwise it causes a leak)
- For caching data, a cache could manage memory itself, for example by clearing automatically the least recently used entries. Or it could let the garbage collector manage it itself entirely, by storing soft or weak references to the cached data.
A JVM is highly optimized, and therefore it is often better to let it decide when to do garbage collector than to try to manage it in the code. However, if the JVM makes the wrong decisions (for example if it causes unacceptable application freezes), it can be tuned to make better decisions in the future. Several startup flags exist to control the garbage collector's behavior (for example change the frequency of collections, use parallel or concurrent GC algorithms, tune the memory reserved for the different GC generations). These startup options allows the programmers (or system administrator) much more control over performance than optimization they can do in their code.The JVM will only GC when its full...
Not exactly true, the JVM will separate memory in different GC generations and collect each of these generations when it is full. Objects that survive collection in a generation will be moved to the next generation. Objects that survive up to the last generation (old) are likely be permanent objects that are required for the application to run. Therefore, garbage collection on the old generation runs much less frequently than on younger generation, but takes longer to run. If too many objects survive up to this generation, it can also be an indication of a memory leak or a need for optimizing memory usage. The visualgc tool can be used to monitor the different generation's memory usages on Sun JVMs.
Did anyone else that the "ease of configuration" for building applications might be driven by the Ruby on Rails push?
This sentence no verb.
Jython's competition is Groovy. Groovy doesn't even have a stable DESIGN, let alone implementation.
The Java libraries range from mediocre to terrible, but that's a separate issue.
Are you on crack? Slam Java for whatever reason you want, but the libraries are widely agreed to be it's greatest strength. Even the libraries that aren't provided in the standard JDK tend to be standardized and very easy to use, javadoced to the hilt. Java's not my favorite, Smalltalk will always have me there, but just which language do you consider to have better built-in library support? C may have more options, but it's a dependency nightmare and libraries aren't nearly as clean, consistent and forward/backward compatible as the Java ones are. I can find easily find a free, well-implemented libary to do whatever I want in Java.
I use it, and I'm happy using high level languages, I'm a big fan of python for example. Nevertheless, I still say java is slow. Why? Because I'm actually trying to use it for actual programs on sub-ghz machines.
I am trolling
Comparisons to C++ are a red herring, languages have moved on since then. Python is both far faster to write (5-10x) and faster in actual use (since the performance-critical extensions are C/C++, wheras all but the very basics of the Java class library are done in Java.
I am trolling
Nevertheless, I still say java is slow. Why? Because I'm actually trying to use it for actual programs on sub-ghz machines.
Modern JVMs produce optimised machine code that can approach that of C++. This process is not dependent on the processor speed. If Java comes close to C++ speed on multi-GHZ machines, it will also come close to C++ speed on sub-GHZ machines.
What might be slow is the Swing GUI, especially with older Java versions.
The fact that MS tried doesn't mean it isn't a problem. It is a problem, the language has no free implementation, I can't recall anyone ever trying to exert as much control over a whole language as Sun does with Java.
I am trolling
a.crossProd(b), or a.dotProd(b).. But if you're looking at a * b in c++ for the first time, which is it?
Hmmm, you're right about that. I was thinking about matrices in my example so there was no ambiguity. In any case I think it's better to be able to at least overload the operators that don't cause ambiguity. In Java I'm forced to write ugly code!
It comes down once again to whether you prefer a powerful language that lets you shoot yourself in the foot, or a less powerful language that lets you write code orders of magnitude faster. I think C++ is in the first category, but Java isn't in the second - give me Python any day.
My website
No, Java is in the middle. I just don't think Python can do all that Java does today, nor it has the tools.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Me neither.
That's your answer to the question that blows a big hole in your "pet theory" -- that it's all about people hating Java for political "non-free" reasons. Wow, you really are an idiot, aren't you?
It couldn't be as simple as the fact that most peoples' experience of Java is slow, ugly, bloated and sucky applications. Could it? Nah... it's got to be political reasons.
1. Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/bin/tput clear");
d =4050435
2. http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
Stop the presses! Java has three GUI toolkits and poor console support? Gosh, do you think they want you to use a GUI instead of the CLI? When will the madness end?
Show me a recently written piece of slow Java code, and I'll show you a programmer who should be looking for a new job. Think Burger King.
Looks like the Sun offices are going to be quiet next week.
Java does have a lot of class libraries, but inactuality, they're about the same size as a graphics toolkit like GTK, Glib, and a C library. Having them bundled with all Java distributions helps with compatibility with all applications and prevents users and developers from having to download/install extra libraries.
Isn't this the point of all programming languages? Making it easier for programmers to program? With your logic all C programmers should be coding in x86 assembly because "[C] allow[s] poor coders to produce code that kind of works rather than total failures[, and it] probably [doesn't] help the language's reputation[,] either." Even though I consider myself a competent C programmer, occasionally I use Java for certain programming tasks. With Java, I find that doing certain tasks are much easier with Java than under C. For example, Java has many helpful libraries, and the base classes are full of many helpful methods. In C, you find yourself having to either search for ready-made libraries that you'll have to learn how to use, or having to code certain helpful tasks by yourself.
I personally find Java to be a pretty nice environment to work in. No, it isn't "free," it's not as fast as C (exasperated by the fact that my fastest machine is a 475MHz K6-2 with 64MB RAM), and sometimes Java can be quite verbose. However, Java provides a lot of helpful classes and packages to choose from that makes development a lot easier. Plus, I don't have to worry about pointers, memory management, and all of that other stuff that I have to keep in mind when programming in C.
That's your answer to the question that blows a big hole in your "pet theory" -- that it's all about people hating Java for political "non-free" reasons. Wow, you really are an idiot, aren't you?
I hope not.
It couldn't be as simple as the fact that most peoples' experience of Java is slow, ugly, bloated and sucky applications. Could it? Nah... it's got to be political reasons.
Yes it has, because any anyone who has actually used Java and developed with Java over the past few years knows, this is a wildly out of date view.
An example of how out of date this is is that the Java IDE NetBeans recently won the developer.com award for best open source IDE. Hardly an indication of 'bloated and sucky'.
Most people use Java daily without knowing it, when they use their banking websites, or chatrooms or sites like E-Bay. Millions of people use Java games on their mobile phones. I hear no complaints about E-bay being slow, bloated and sucky!
I would have said that your point of view would have been correct about 4-5 years ago.
There is no doubt that there is huge 'geek' resistance to Java because it is not open source. Perhaps because of this many such people have not used it for years, and so have a widly out-of-date idea of what it is like.
Apple has always been rather behind in releasing Java versions.
Apple does not develop Java. Sun does.
Apple does not develop Java. Sun does.
No. Sun provides Java implementations for Solaris, Windows and Linux. Companies can license Sun's source code to produce ports of Java for their operating systems. This is what IBM and Apple do. Other companies produce Java independently, such as HP.
This is why the Java versions produced by IBM, Apple and others lags behind the Sun version - it is the time taken to produce ports.
Bzzt. Factually incorrect. You could write a simple 5-line Java program and compile it to prove whether or not this works. I could cite the Java specification where it defines what variable names are considered valid, but instead I just took an existing short piece of junk code and changed a variable name to start with the underscore. Guess what? It compiles fine.
import java.util.TimeZone;
public class TimeZoneDumper {
public static void main(String [] args) {
String [] _zoneIDs = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();
for (int i = 0; i < _zoneIDs.length; i++) {
TimeZone zone = TimeZone.getTimeZone(_zoneIDs[i]);
System.out.println(_zoneIDs[i] + " - offset = " + zone.getRawOffset());
}
}
}
A Java identifier (variable name) must start with a letter, true, but the specification goes on to say:
Yes, it may well be swing (but it's not an old version, I'm using the 1.5.0.04 and it's still slow) but that's the only java gui you can use without losing the whole point of using java. So the effect is that java programs are slow.
I am trolling
Agreed about development speed and libraries. I'm porting some Java to C for a small memory legacy project and it's painful: the lack of a GC, exceptions, persistance, boundary and null protection make it like going back to the dark ages, using C++ would make little difference. I'm having to write my own C code because so many of the C database libraries are poorly written (e.g. SQLite and GNU db) e.g. use too much memory, use the wrong data types, too many #defines, are not easily portable, have no caching and fail to pass 'lint' compiler checks. People my complain about minor Java portability issues, but they forget just how bad C and C++ were!
indeed, thanks & sorry.
check your speling