In case you haven't noticed, Ms. Clinton has been attacking Bush for not supporting strongly enough Israel's attack on the Palestinians. You won't get any argument from me about the evilness of Ms. Clinton or Bush, but please go read up on these things before commenting.
The neat thing about information is that copying it does not put any burden on the original author. Theo forked NetBSD -- you could too, if you wanted. It hasn't exactly killed NetBSD. Changes flow between all three projects.
They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I waked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."
And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
> If you are concerned that your elected representatives can't be trusted to make responsible decisions, then that is where you should focus.
Unfortunately, I don't really have any control over the election of my national representatives -- they are Democratic incumbents, this is California, and they get lots of money from people with more money than I do.
> You may not have noticed, but there are some people out there who Really Don't Like Us. Some of them are pretty open about not liking us. They wave flags and rant and rave in peaceful demonstrations. But some of them keep quiet about not liking us, and you don't find out about them until they fly a plane through a building, by which time it's a bit late, especially for the people in the plane (and the people in the building, for that matter).
Did I miss the part where the CIA prevented the attack on the World Trade Center? It looked to me like the attackers successfully accomplished what it was they were after. I think I missed the part of your reply where you talked about the great things that the CIA had done specifically to help people. We have quite a few examples of situations where the CIA hurt people (Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, other Latin American dictators). Whether Mossad helped undermine the nasty dictatorship in Iraq is beside the point -- the CIA has to be competent, as well as aiming to undermine the nasties, in order to be a net plus. And we know that they aren't always aiming to undermine the nasties.
And screw the flamebait moderation -- I haven't gotten a reply yet that actually showed why the CIA needs to exist. I am totally serious.
> I shudder to think of what would be done to us without them out there intercepting things.
I don't. What do they actually do that helps anyone? Why the need for "intel" -- aside from military adventuring, dissent suppression, and occasional government-overthrowing?
> Maybe they need occasional moral steering
If they were all employed doing something productive, we wouldn't need to steer them. Besides, from a practical standpoint, how are we to steer them under the current regime? They're not exactly going to listen to you or me.
> the NSA, which is an electronic intel (ELINT) agency
Another good point -- what do the NSA do for anyone? Surely all the smart people doing cryptanalysis and whatnot for them could be doing something more constructive.
The CIA existed to fight the Cold War. It now has no legitimate reason to exist, and must struggle to pretend it does. Perhaps "we" need it to keep overthrowing democratically elected governments in Latin America . . . yeah, that's it.
Any job is a dead end, so long the worker does not control the means of production, and the surplus of her labor is taken away from her by those who do. There is plenty of real work to do -- but not very many jobs that will support you doing it.
I take it you didn't read the moglen link. Private property is usually justified by pointing out the damage to its owner were it to be taken away. Knowledge does not have this problem -- if you share your knowledge, you are no worse off, and may in fact benefit in non-monetary ways (they do exist!).
That is what I meant by IP being a broken concept. How can you really think that someone owns a thought? Do I own "blue"? Or "crunchiness"?
You bring up a separate issue, that of temporary monopolies to promote creative endeavors (aka copyright). Note the very substantial differences between copyright and standard property concepts.
Even copyrights are a workaround, rather than a real solution, to the need to for creative work. If we weren't all trapped in jobs, making money for the owners of the corporation, and consuming ourselves to death, we might have time to do creative work without having a business model. In fact, such a world would not involve the horrendous overhead (sales, marketing, finance, investors, investor magazines, etc.) that your "software model" involves. All those salespeople could be doing something else with their time -- raising their children, for example, or dancing, or reading, or walking around in the out-of-doors.
Have you actually written Perl programs with lots of classes? It's a bit ugly, but not that bad. I actually kind of *like* how exposed the mechanics are. It is a pain to have to write the extra line of code in the constructor to bless the reference, but that's all it is: one line of code. Not the end of the world.
> Tomcat is a reference and not something that should be put into production
It certainly seems that way. I find that very disappointing.
> There is nothing hidden about the Resin source. It is downloadable and modifiable.
Wow, you are right about this! I will start agitating for further consideration of Resin. Thanks for pointing that out.
> IBM can't release an LGPL implementation. They dont own Java.
Do you mean there are patent issues, or trademark issues, or what? Even if they had to call it JNJ (JNJ's Not Java), what's to stop them from writing the program? Clearly, copyright law bars them from using Sun's code, but that's not what I'm proposing.
> I just read the section of the FAQ that you mentioned and I see accusations with no proof to back them up.
(warning: sarcasm) Sure, those people are reimplementing all of Sun's libraries simply for the pleasure of doing so. (end of sarcasm)
There were actually two projects working on that (GNU Classpath and the GCJ people at Cygnus) but they have merged efforts now.
Please, go read some stuff by Eben Moglen. With zero copying costs for software, free riders aren't a problem. The only trouble at the moment is that anyone without a job has no health care, and can't pay rent. I really think that if we had another 100-200 good programmers set loose from the capitalist system, most of the software "industry" would disappear pretty quickly.
> Yes...I tend to agree that they pretend to be more open than they really are. I do take issue with that much more than the proprietary nature of Java itself. I'm not sure what you're referring to about undoced native functions and gcj.
I strongly suggest you read the relevant gcj FAQ entry -- I think you may be underestimating how proprietary it is.
> And youre right that GC doesnt solve all the memory management issues. wish all people thought that;)
Yep. In fact, when we used Swing last year, we had lots of trouble with memory leaks in the libraries. Aargh!
> Perl is very handy but there are many projects I wouldn't want to touch with it.
What sorts of projects? As long as your programmers are skilled, I think performance is the only real problem.
> That being said I wouldnt use anything else for lots of my scripting and admin tasks.
I find that using map(), grep(), sub{} expressions, and the class system makes manipulating complex data structures very easy. And most performance-sensitive things are done off in C libraries.
> I just can't deal with C++ anymore.... Are generic containers less verbose?
The main place where I encounter verbosity is in using STL iterators, but even there I don't see that its any less verbose that Java, where you are either using iterators or for loops.
> Its too "dirty" and there are far to many things it leaves you to deal with.
I think C++ is way too complicated, but if you stick to unix, the overall experience isn't too yucky. What irritates me about STL is the compiler-compatibility problems, particularly on MS Windows.
> I think Java's best space is in enterprise-level applications. I dont see Perl being all that useful there nor C++....
I'm not sure what you mean by "enterprise-level applications" -- do you mean things like the EToys ecommerce system? If you mean, "we have to sell this thing to a PHB who will only buy it if it is written in Java," then, okay, I guess that's the only option.
> I'd be curious to know what app server or servlet container youre using. Several are notorious for what you're reporting.
They are using Tomcat. Tomcat 4 doesn't seem to be any faster than 3; both have about 10 times the latency of Apache for "hello world."
We tried out Resin last year, and it was much better than Tomcat, but building your app on a hidden-source-code foundation is just asking for trouble down the line. Not to mention having to deal with licensing issues.
> And anyhow Apache said things are getting better and they have support from others (like IBM).
Then IBM should release an LGPL implementation of the JVM and class libraries, and everyone should use that. As things stand now, Sun has control, and they have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted.
Seriously, read the GCJ FAQ entry and think about it for a minute or two. What Sun is doing is pretty insidious.
> I dont remember being forced to use most of what Sun provides. What they do provide though is a huge API that covers pretty much all the bases. You seem to forget that not everyone cares if something is proprietary or not. And Java certainly is not proprietary in the sense that you mean.
What bothers me is that Sun pretends to be all friendly and open, while actually using a restrictive license / undocumented native functions to make it difficult for people to implement their own JVMs. If you write your app using the Sun-provided libraries, you won't be able to run it with gcj, for instance.
>> As for man-years, I would imagine that using Java increases the time required by quite a bit. > Why would you imagine that other than never having done a project in Java?
When I did a project in Java, I found it much more convenient than C -- in particular, that it handled null pointer derefs and array out-of-bounds cases nicely, giving a stack trace that showed where the problem was. Also, garbage collection is nice, though it doesn't free you completely from memory management.
When I subsequently learned Perl really well, I found I was several times faster in Perl than in Java or in C. Not "line noise" code -- nicely written code, broken up into little classes, etc.. Java is so *verbose* that it just takes way more effort to get anything done, and once you've written it, tearing it down and rewriting seems pretty unappealing. Not to say that I love everything about Perl -- I think it is too complicated and poorly defined. But boy is it handy!
More recently, I've been doing C++ coding, which feels to me kind of like Java but without the memory bloat, and with nice generic containers (fewer verbose casts!). But boy do I miss map() and grep(). The STL equivalents just aren't the same at all. I can't say I miss anything about Java, but that may be because I haven't had to do any difficult memory management.
This is why I don't see why Java is useful -- it's more bloated than perl, comparable (but more variable) performance to perl, but even more verbose than C++. It combines the worst of both worlds! The Sun-is-evil slant is just the icing on the cake.
> Servlets work great.
Some people I'm working with are doing a big servlet application. They say it is very convenient, but we're having serious performance problems, and the memory usage is simply horrendous.
> I find it amusing all your railing against Java when Apache is a huge Java supporter in the web space.
I guess you haven't been following the latest stuff in the Apache section. Sun uses the Apache brand to gain credibility, Apache projects get Sun full-time developers: should be great, right? It would be, if Sun weren't so nasty.
Re:This is just stupid...
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> Still to today there is no standard portable thread library in C++.
There is no portable concept of threads in various operating systems, either.
> Still to today there is no standard portable GUI library in C++.
There are a number of GUI libraries; why the obsession with a "standard" library? GUIs written in Java tend to be ugly and monstrously bloated programs. As of a year ago, Swing still had pretty serious memory leaks, and AWT still looked like donkey turds. Do you remember the original marketing spin from Sun about Java? All GUI programs were going to be written in Java, so they would run everywhere! Sun would write a Java web browser, that would be super-fantastic, and run everywhere! Microsoft would crumble as all user apps were written to Java APIs! Only of course HotJava sucked, as did pretty much all GUI Java programs, and now Sun wants to talk to you about server-side Java. Strange, given all that talk about portability. They basically retreated from GUI land, and are pushing slow server software.
> Still to today there is no standard web services
That's odd, on my planet there is an incredible wealth of libraries in C and C++ implementing all kinds of wonderful things. For a start, you could look into the GNU project (including GNOME) or KDE.
> C++ is the best language I ever worked with(look at Spirit parser library, or at Open C++), but no vendor gives you a wide set of standard libraries. The only standard is the standard C++ library (where STL is a part off) and the standard C lib.
> STL exists since 6 years now. And? It still is not supported on all platforms.
C++ is horrifically complicated, so every compiler implements it a bit differently. STL pushes those horrifically complicated features pretty hard,
> I now programe since 4 years JAVA.
I guess you really like all those really long type names you have to use to cast objects that come out of containers. You must also really like FOR loops, and be bothered by complicated concepts like map, filter, etc..
> EVERYTHING IN JAVA IS A STANDARD. And works on all machines the same.
Meaning you have what Sun gives you. You are under the control of a vendor whose interests don't particularly line up with yours. Sounds a lot like other proprietary software situations, doesn't it?
> Before you have not worked in a > 100 members development team on a > 300 man years project, just shut up to trash a language.
There are lots of projects to be done (I would venture, even, most of them) that don't require 100 active developers. As for man-years, I would imagine that using Java increases the time required by quite a bit.
> Most arguements against Java are either wrong(other languages are easyer, lol)
For many tasks, other language are much easier to use. Want to do massive string manipulation-type stuff? Way easier to write in Perl. Want to use higher-order functions? Functional languages (e.g. ML, haskell) are a much better fit. Want to implement your program quickly? Java programs tend to be very lengthy, compared to implementations in less verbose languages.
> or outdated(its to slow, Sun makes fraud, LOL even louder).
Sun has been promising for many years that the next version of Java would be the one that solved all the performance problems. I haven't seen it happen yet. The RAM requirements are particularly egregious. The performance of JIT programs is incredibly erratic, to the point where it is difficult to measure the troughput, because the response time varies to wildly from request to request.
> BTW: ROOT and CINT are nice projects and they work pretty well. I played with both.
That's nice. It's always good to have more free software!
> If C++ would compile to JAVA bytecode I would stick to C++.
This is a really strange statement. C++ is incredibly complicated, largely because of the keep-it-close-to-the-metal spirit interacting poorly with all the features Bjarne crammed in. A C++ compiler targeting Java bytecode would get you a horrendously complicated language, and a slow program. The worst of both worlds!
> But JBC has so many advantages....
Aside from burning all your RAM and CPU.
> E.g. you can link with other languages compiling to JBC(C, PERL, Python, RUBY, Prolog, LISP, SCHEME, ML... well, there are more languages compiling to java byte code than I can program in)
Definitely a neat feature. It's too bad that the bytecode language was aimed at embedded devices, and so is way too simple to convey at a high level what your program is doing. This makes implementing a fast JVM extremely difficult!
> C++ has no reflection, Perl has no reflection either... well, you hate Java, I asume you have no clue what reflection si and why it is usefull.
Perl lets you do all kinds of wacky things at runtime, including inspecting namespaces, inspecting the runtime stack, creating new classes -- with eval, you can basically do anything! Not to say that Perl is wonderful in every way (I will not defend the rampant cruftiness), but it *is* very flexible.
> Well, as you hate Java you will never know. Keep sitting in your little hole, but don't cry when the time for old outdated languages is over. (Like it is for COBOL, Simula, Smaltalk... yeah they still exist, but how was it for/with them ten years ago?)
And you will keep writing FOR loops, casting pointers you get from container objects (all that effort to declare the types of things, and then you have to throw the info away when they're in a list!), and reading up on the last "hot new trend" being pushed by the marketeers at Sun. Is it B2B-enabled Web Vortals? Or is it P2P Web Services with XML? I lose track.
> Regarding your rant against servlets: Easyer than a servlet? Even more easyer than a servlet? I don't know about mod_snake but about mod_perl I know pretty well.
As I mentioned above, for string manipulation, Perl is very convenient. When building a web page, it happens sometimes that one does . . . string manipulation! In those cases, I'll always take the four lines of Perl over ten to twenty lines of Java, even if I can't claim I'm using an Enterprise Java Bean.
> They ara FAR away from a servlet. FAR. What do you think why there are PERL servlet APIs implemented right now? Because of the ideas behind the servlet environment and the frameworks. Look for "libservlet" on freshmeat.
(incidentally, writing apache modules in C is also really easy)
Because it is *really easy* to code in Perl. People code all kinds of stuff in Perl -- surely you have seen CPAN. People write all this stuff because Perl makes it easy. If someone likes Sun's content handler API better than Apache's, they can implement it, no big deal.
If you want one vendor controlling everthing, why not use the Microsoft stuff? At least they don't pretend to have a Community Process, etc..
If you want strong typing, try ML, haskell, O'Caml, etc.
If you want a short program, Perl wins almost every time.
I just don't see where the tradeoffs make sense for Java.
Again -- if it needs to be fast, use C or C++. If you need to write it quickly, use Perl or Python or TCL or some higher-level language. I am *off topic* here, just bashing Java -- nothing about scriptable C (which also seems moronic to me). What do you get from servlets that you couldn't do more easily with mod_snake or mod_perl?
Besides, like I said, Java is all about proprietary maneuvers and bad vibes. Why bother with all that, when people are cooperating on better stuff?
Right . . . Java is for those cases when runtime performance is unimportant, *and* programmer convenience in unimportant. I truly believe it is a fraud by Sun, with the goal of pushing more hardware. "Oh, your Java program is slow? Just buy this $2 million Sun box, and it will be just fine." And I'm sure everyone here knows what a fraud the whole "Java Community Process" thing is. Java is a shitty language with a proprietary, poorly implemented runtime environment.
If you mostly use terminal apps, try using "screen" as your primary switch-between-programs environment.
I always have the same app running at a particular screen number, so switching never takes more than a second. Editor? ^]0 and I'm there. Email? Mutt is running at ^]1. News? See slrn at ^]5.
I've been using this type of setup for a year now, and it's great! I almost never interact with my WM at all, and have disabled all window decoration.
Has anyone tried using a VR glove as a keyboard device? It seems to me that getting some freedom of movement in the shoulders and arms would help some people with typing injuries. Also, combined with video glasses, you could build a nice wearable computer. You could program while walking around or lying in bed.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you haven't noticed, Ms. Clinton has been attacking Bush for not supporting strongly enough Israel's attack on the Palestinians. You won't get any argument from me about the evilness of Ms. Clinton or Bush, but please go read up on these things before commenting.
The neat thing about information is that copying it does not put any burden on the original author. Theo forked NetBSD -- you could too, if you wanted. It hasn't exactly killed NetBSD. Changes flow between all three projects.
.
Of course, I've probably just been trolled . . .
Wasabi Systems, an embedded NetBSD company, is doing really well, last time I heard.
They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so
I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I waked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."
And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
Amen!
Concern about the afterlife distracts people from *real problems* in the *real world*.
> If you are concerned that your elected representatives can't be trusted to make responsible decisions, then that is where you should focus.
Unfortunately, I don't really have any control over the election of my national representatives -- they are Democratic incumbents, this is California, and they get lots of money from people with more money than I do.
> You may not have noticed, but there are some people out there who Really Don't Like Us. Some of them are pretty open about not liking us. They wave flags and rant and rave in peaceful demonstrations. But some of them keep quiet about not liking us, and you don't find out about them until they fly a plane through a building, by which time it's a bit late, especially for the people in the plane (and the people in the building, for that matter).
Did I miss the part where the CIA prevented the attack on the World Trade Center? It looked to me like the attackers successfully accomplished what it was they were after. I think I missed the part of your reply where you talked about the great things that the CIA had done specifically to help people. We have quite a few examples of situations where the CIA hurt people (Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, other Latin American dictators). Whether Mossad helped undermine the nasty dictatorship in Iraq is beside the point -- the CIA has to be competent, as well as aiming to undermine the nasties, in order to be a net plus. And we know that they aren't always aiming to undermine the nasties.
And screw the flamebait moderation -- I haven't gotten a reply yet that actually showed why the CIA needs to exist. I am totally serious.
> I shudder to think of what would be done to us without them out there intercepting things.
I don't. What do they actually do that helps anyone? Why the need for "intel" -- aside from military adventuring, dissent suppression, and occasional government-overthrowing?
> Maybe they need occasional moral steering
If they were all employed doing something productive, we wouldn't need to steer them. Besides, from a practical standpoint, how are we to steer them under the current regime? They're not exactly going to listen to you or me.
> the NSA, which is an electronic intel (ELINT) agency
Another good point -- what do the NSA do for anyone? Surely all the smart people doing cryptanalysis and whatnot for them could be doing something more constructive.
The CIA existed to fight the Cold War. It now has no legitimate reason to exist, and must struggle to pretend it does. Perhaps "we" need it to keep overthrowing democratically elected governments in Latin America . . . yeah, that's it.
e r1 1.html
Anybody remember Sept 11, 1973?
http://www.geocities.com/educhile_1970s/Septemb
Any job is a dead end, so long the worker does not control the means of production, and the surplus of her labor is taken away from her by those who do. There is plenty of real work to do -- but not very many jobs that will support you doing it.
I thought pirates got their profits from robbery on the high seas?
I take it you didn't read the moglen link. Private property is usually justified by pointing out the damage to its owner were it to be taken away. Knowledge does not have this problem -- if you share your knowledge, you are no worse off, and may in fact benefit in non-monetary ways (they do exist!).
That is what I meant by IP being a broken concept. How can you really think that someone owns a thought? Do I own "blue"? Or "crunchiness"?
You bring up a separate issue, that of temporary monopolies to promote creative endeavors (aka copyright). Note the very substantial differences between copyright and standard property concepts.
Even copyrights are a workaround, rather than a real solution, to the need to for creative work. If we weren't all trapped in jobs, making money for the owners of the corporation, and consuming ourselves to death, we might have time to do creative work without having a business model. In fact, such a world would not involve the horrendous overhead (sales, marketing, finance, investors, investor magazines, etc.) that your "software model" involves. All those salespeople could be doing something else with their time -- raising their children, for example, or dancing, or reading, or walking around in the out-of-doors.
> They mentioned using Perl's OO features. Yuck.
Have you actually written Perl programs with lots of classes? It's a bit ugly, but not that bad. I actually kind of *like* how exposed the mechanics are. It is a pain to have to write the extra line of code in the constructor to bless the reference, but that's all it is: one line of code. Not the end of the world.
> Tomcat is a reference and not something that should be put into production
It certainly seems that way. I find that very disappointing.
> There is nothing hidden about the Resin source. It is downloadable and modifiable.
Wow, you are right about this! I will start agitating for further consideration of Resin. Thanks for pointing that out.
> IBM can't release an LGPL implementation. They dont own Java.
Do you mean there are patent issues, or trademark issues, or what? Even if they had to call it JNJ (JNJ's Not Java), what's to stop them from writing the program? Clearly, copyright law bars them from using Sun's code, but that's not what I'm proposing.
> I just read the section of the FAQ that you mentioned and I see accusations with no proof to back them up.
(warning: sarcasm)
Sure, those people are reimplementing all of Sun's libraries simply for the pleasure of doing so.
(end of sarcasm)
There were actually two projects working on that (GNU Classpath and the GCJ people at Cygnus) but they have merged efforts now.
IP is a totally broken concept. Do you really want to live in a world where "Remembering is copying, and copying is theft?"
Please, go read some stuff by Eben Moglen. With zero copying costs for software, free riders aren't a problem. The only trouble at the moment is that anyone without a job has no health care, and can't pay rent. I really think that if we had another 100-200 good programmers set loose from the capitalist system, most of the software "industry" would disappear pretty quickly.
> Yes...I tend to agree that they pretend to be more open than they really are. I do take issue with that much more than the proprietary nature of Java itself. I'm not sure what you're referring to about undoced native functions and gcj.
;)
I strongly suggest you read the relevant gcj FAQ entry -- I think you may be underestimating how proprietary it is.
> And youre right that GC doesnt solve all the memory management issues. wish all people thought that
Yep. In fact, when we used Swing last year, we had lots of trouble with memory leaks in the libraries. Aargh!
> Perl is very handy but there are many projects I wouldn't want to touch with it.
What sorts of projects? As long as your programmers are skilled, I think performance is the only real problem.
> That being said I wouldnt use anything else for lots of my scripting and admin tasks.
I find that using map(), grep(), sub{} expressions, and the class system makes manipulating complex data structures very easy. And most performance-sensitive things are done off in C libraries.
> I just can't deal with C++ anymore.... Are generic containers less verbose?
I think so.
using namespace std;
...
map<int,int> foo;
foo[1] = 2;
cout << foo[1];
The main place where I encounter verbosity is in using STL iterators, but even there I don't see that its any less verbose that Java, where you are either using iterators or for loops.
> Its too "dirty" and there are far to many things it leaves you to deal with.
I think C++ is way too complicated, but if you stick to unix, the overall experience isn't too yucky. What irritates me about STL is the compiler-compatibility problems, particularly on MS Windows.
> I think Java's best space is in enterprise-level applications. I dont see Perl being all that useful there nor C++....
I'm not sure what you mean by "enterprise-level applications" -- do you mean things like the EToys ecommerce system? If you mean, "we have to sell this thing to a PHB who will only buy it if it is written in Java," then, okay, I guess that's the only option.
> I'd be curious to know what app server or servlet container youre using. Several are notorious for what you're reporting.
They are using Tomcat. Tomcat 4 doesn't seem to be any faster than 3; both have about 10 times the latency of Apache for "hello world."
We tried out Resin last year, and it was much better than Tomcat, but building your app on a hidden-source-code foundation is just asking for trouble down the line. Not to mention having to deal with licensing issues.
> And anyhow Apache said things are getting better and they have support from others (like IBM).
Then IBM should release an LGPL implementation of the JVM and class libraries, and everyone should use that. As things stand now, Sun has control, and they have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted.
Seriously, read the GCJ FAQ entry and think about it for a minute or two. What Sun is doing is pretty insidious.
> I dont remember being forced to use most of what Sun provides. What they do provide though is a huge API that covers pretty much all the bases. You seem to forget that not everyone cares if something is proprietary or not. And Java certainly is not proprietary in the sense that you mean.
What bothers me is that Sun pretends to be all friendly and open, while actually using a restrictive license / undocumented native functions to make it difficult for people to implement their own JVMs. If you write your app using the Sun-provided libraries, you won't be able to run it with gcj, for instance.
>> As for man-years, I would imagine that using Java increases the time required by quite a bit.
> Why would you imagine that other than never having done a project in Java?
When I did a project in Java, I found it much more convenient than C -- in particular, that it handled null pointer derefs and array out-of-bounds cases nicely, giving a stack trace that showed where the problem was. Also, garbage collection is nice, though it doesn't free you completely from memory management.
When I subsequently learned Perl really well, I found I was several times faster in Perl than in Java or in C. Not "line noise" code -- nicely written code, broken up into little classes, etc.. Java is so *verbose* that it just takes way more effort to get anything done, and once you've written it, tearing it down and rewriting seems pretty unappealing. Not to say that I love everything about Perl -- I think it is too complicated and poorly defined. But boy is it handy!
More recently, I've been doing C++ coding, which feels to me kind of like Java but without the memory bloat, and with nice generic containers (fewer verbose casts!). But boy do I miss map() and grep(). The STL equivalents just aren't the same at all. I can't say I miss anything about Java, but that may be because I haven't had to do any difficult memory management.
This is why I don't see why Java is useful -- it's more bloated than perl, comparable (but more variable) performance to perl, but even more verbose than C++. It combines the worst of both worlds! The Sun-is-evil slant is just the icing on the cake.
> Servlets work great.
Some people I'm working with are doing a big servlet application. They say it is very convenient, but we're having serious performance problems, and the memory usage is simply horrendous.
> I find it amusing all your railing against Java when Apache is a huge Java supporter in the web space.
I guess you haven't been following the latest stuff in the Apache section. Sun uses the Apache brand to gain credibility, Apache projects get Sun full-time developers: should be great, right? It would be, if Sun weren't so nasty.
Eben Moglen is
> Still to today there is no standard portable thread library in C++.
....
... well, there are more languages compiling to java byte code than I can program in)
... well, you hate Java, I asume you have no clue what reflection si and why it is usefull.
... yeah they still exist, but how was it for/with them ten years ago?)
There is no portable concept of threads in various operating systems, either.
> Still to today there is no standard portable GUI library in C++.
There are a number of GUI libraries; why the obsession with a "standard" library? GUIs written in Java tend to be ugly and monstrously bloated programs. As of a year ago, Swing still had pretty serious memory leaks, and AWT still looked like donkey turds. Do you remember the original marketing spin from Sun about Java? All GUI programs were going to be written in Java, so they would run everywhere! Sun would write a Java web browser, that would be super-fantastic, and run everywhere! Microsoft would crumble as all user apps were written to Java APIs! Only of course HotJava sucked, as did pretty much all GUI Java programs, and now Sun wants to talk to you about server-side Java. Strange, given all that talk about portability. They basically retreated from GUI land, and are pushing slow server software.
> Still to today there is no standard web services
meaningless market-speak
> XML
overhyped (and brain-damaged) serialization syntax
> directory services
a weak version of a database
> or ANY other standard library available in C++.
That's odd, on my planet there is an incredible wealth of libraries in C and C++ implementing all kinds of wonderful things. For a start, you could look into the GNU project (including GNOME) or KDE.
> C++ is the best language I ever worked with(look at Spirit parser library, or at Open C++), but no vendor gives you a wide set of standard libraries. The only standard is the standard C++ library (where STL is a part off) and the standard C lib.
> STL exists since 6 years now. And? It still is not supported on all platforms.
C++ is horrifically complicated, so every compiler implements it a bit differently. STL pushes those horrifically complicated features pretty hard,
> I now programe since 4 years JAVA.
I guess you really like all those really long type names you have to use to cast objects that come out of containers. You must also really like FOR loops, and be bothered by complicated concepts like map, filter, etc..
> EVERYTHING IN JAVA IS A STANDARD. And works on all machines the same.
Meaning you have what Sun gives you. You are under the control of a vendor whose interests don't particularly line up with yours. Sounds a lot like other proprietary software situations, doesn't it?
> Before you have not worked in a > 100 members development team on a > 300 man years project, just shut up to trash a language.
There are lots of projects to be done (I would venture, even, most of them) that don't require 100 active developers. As for man-years, I would imagine that using Java increases the time required by quite a bit.
> Most arguements against Java are either wrong(other languages are easyer, lol)
For many tasks, other language are much easier to use. Want to do massive string manipulation-type stuff? Way easier to write in Perl. Want to use higher-order functions? Functional languages (e.g. ML, haskell) are a much better fit. Want to implement your program quickly? Java programs tend to be very lengthy, compared to implementations in less verbose languages.
> or outdated(its to slow, Sun makes fraud, LOL even louder).
Sun has been promising for many years that the next version of Java would be the one that solved all the performance problems. I haven't seen it happen yet. The RAM requirements are particularly egregious. The performance of JIT programs is incredibly erratic, to the point where it is difficult to measure the troughput, because the response time varies to wildly from request to request.
> BTW: ROOT and CINT are nice projects and they work pretty well. I played with both.
That's nice. It's always good to have more free software!
> If C++ would compile to JAVA bytecode I would stick to C++.
This is a really strange statement. C++ is incredibly complicated, largely because of the keep-it-close-to-the-metal spirit interacting poorly with all the features Bjarne crammed in. A C++ compiler targeting Java bytecode would get you a horrendously complicated language, and a slow program. The worst of both worlds!
> But JBC has so many advantages
Aside from burning all your RAM and CPU.
> E.g. you can link with other languages compiling to JBC(C, PERL, Python, RUBY, Prolog, LISP, SCHEME, ML
Definitely a neat feature. It's too bad that the bytecode language was aimed at embedded devices, and so is way too simple to convey at a high level what your program is doing. This makes implementing a fast JVM extremely difficult!
> C++ has no reflection, Perl has no reflection either
Perl lets you do all kinds of wacky things at runtime, including inspecting namespaces, inspecting the runtime stack, creating new classes -- with eval, you can basically do anything! Not to say that Perl is wonderful in every way (I will not defend the rampant cruftiness), but it *is* very flexible.
> Well, as you hate Java you will never know. Keep sitting in your little hole, but don't cry when the time for old outdated languages is over. (Like it is for COBOL, Simula, Smaltalk
And you will keep writing FOR loops, casting pointers you get from container objects (all that effort to declare the types of things, and then you have to throw the info away when they're in a list!), and reading up on the last "hot new trend" being pushed by the marketeers at Sun. Is it B2B-enabled Web Vortals? Or is it P2P Web Services with XML? I lose track.
> Regarding your rant against servlets: Easyer than a servlet? Even more easyer than a servlet? I don't know about mod_snake but about mod_perl I know pretty well.
As I mentioned above, for string manipulation, Perl is very convenient. When building a web page, it happens sometimes that one does . . . string manipulation! In those cases, I'll always take the four lines of Perl over ten to twenty lines of Java, even if I can't claim I'm using an Enterprise Java Bean.
> They ara FAR away from a servlet. FAR. What do you think why there are PERL servlet APIs implemented right now? Because of the ideas behind the servlet environment and the frameworks. Look for "libservlet" on freshmeat.
(incidentally, writing apache modules in C is also really easy)
Because it is *really easy* to code in Perl. People code all kinds of stuff in Perl -- surely you have seen CPAN. People write all this stuff because Perl makes it easy. If someone likes Sun's content handler API better than Apache's, they can implement it, no big deal.
If you want one vendor controlling everthing, why not use the Microsoft stuff? At least they don't pretend to have a Community Process, etc..
If you want strong typing, try ML, haskell, O'Caml, etc.
If you want a short program, Perl wins almost every time.
I just don't see where the tradeoffs make sense for Java.
See the GPL, v2, section 3: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
Obfuscated code does not meet this criterion.
Yikes! Now even the editors are trolling!
Again -- if it needs to be fast, use C or C++. If you need to write it quickly, use Perl or Python or TCL or some higher-level language. I am *off topic* here, just bashing Java -- nothing about scriptable C (which also seems moronic to me). What do you get from servlets that you couldn't do more easily with mod_snake or mod_perl?
Besides, like I said, Java is all about proprietary maneuvers and bad vibes. Why bother with all that, when people are cooperating on better stuff?
Right . . . Java is for those cases when runtime performance is unimportant, *and* programmer convenience in unimportant. I truly believe it is a fraud by Sun, with the goal of pushing more hardware. "Oh, your Java program is slow? Just buy this $2 million Sun box, and it will be just fine." And I'm sure everyone here knows what a fraud the whole "Java Community Process" thing is. Java is a shitty language with a proprietary, poorly implemented runtime environment.
If you mostly use terminal apps, try using "screen" as your primary switch-between-programs environment.
I always have the same app running at a particular screen number, so switching never takes more than a second. Editor? ^]0 and I'm there. Email? Mutt is running at ^]1. News? See slrn at ^]5.
I've been using this type of setup for a year now, and it's great! I almost never interact with my WM at all, and have disabled all window decoration.
Has anyone tried using a VR glove as a keyboard device? It seems to me that getting some freedom of movement in the shoulders and arms would help some people with typing injuries. Also, combined with video glasses, you could build a nice wearable computer. You could program while walking around or lying in bed.