The economic history of both Europe and America over the past several centuries would disagree with you.
The business cycle / market cycle, in goods, services, and jobs, is an observable phenomenon, mainly due to the complex nature of the economy. You can't point the finger at a single entity to blame for all your woes; that would be too easy.
DVI is a standard. It works on PC's. http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html ?i=1577
VGA is a technology that's almost 15 years old. Shouldn't a company dedicated to high-end graphical design want to push the envelope here a little, even if it means using a little teeny (free) dongle to adapt back to VGA?
This argument is almost as asine as suggesting that one shouldn't have to put up with thos stupid AC adapters, why can't they be built into the case?
Look at J2EE and you'll see most of the "innovations" in ASP.NET are really just bringing it up to par with the base line J2EE implementations out there. Clustered session management is old hat. User & server controls have been out in Java since 1999 with JSP tag libraries. Ever try writing a custom control in.NET? See you in 2004. It's not easy, compared to tag libs.
As for drag 'n drop, I'd really like you to build a production website with drag 'n drop. Really. Graphic designers everywhere are hanging up their BBEdits forever as we speak.
I would suggest there's a big difference between design integrity and purity. Java has a certain philosophy of what languages should be, where certain tradeoffs should be made, and it sticks to it. There's a significant amount of cognitive predictability in the language, it doesn't include "trap doors" to change the meaning or intent of well-known constructs such as operators, primitive (naturally "value") types, and reference/object types. One may complain that primitive types should be transparently viewed as reference types (the "autoboxing" argument), and that's a valid concern, probably to be addressed by Java 1.5.
"Early drafts are pratically identical to "The Hidden Fortress""
I just re-watched the Hidden Fortress recently, saw Lucas' interview on the Criterion disc discussing how it influenced him. Considering the final Star Wars really isn't that similar to The Hidden Fortress, I question the above statement.
Lucas took the 2 comic sidekicks of the movie and turned them into the Droids. And there was a princess being smuggled somewhere.
"You're implying a lot of neurological theory here that doesn't necessarily exist"
Probably not in that field. I'm talking about pedogagical theory that does exist: that people have different learning styles, and some can't learn very well without collaboration.
That's a good explanation of what it means to be proramming, btw. Bubbles 'n' lines never help much.:)
Fair enough, I think you've probably provided a counter argument I can agree with.
I think this lack of reality probably is going to really hurt, if not completely transform, colleges in the long run. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." --Philip K. Dick
I'm not suggesting that everyone verbatim copy code. I'm suggesting that hindering collaboration is limiting learning in an unacceptable way.
Obviously if someone can't do the work by themselves, they're incompetent. I'm concerned about the thought that it's somehow superior learning experience if someone learned how to do it by themselves through their own experimentation vs. asking someone for help the 1st and 2nd time, and then incorporating that lesson so they could to it themselves from then on. That's what collaboration is about.
"There is a fine line between peer tutoring and cheating. I can say, as someone who is often approached for help, that there are two types of people who seek help. The first type are those just looking for an answer. The second are those who are actually looking to understand an answer."
I agree with this completely. My view is that the second type of person shouldn't be penalized because the first type of person exists.
The university I attended was the opposite of Georgia Tech: they told us on day 1 that if we didn't collaborate with our peers on our assignments or visit the tutors, WE WOULD FAIL. So it's striking to me the difference in philosophy.
"I have to imagine that most students go to other students--as opposed to going to a professor--in order to receive an answer. Really, why would you pay to goto a university if you are not learning from the people who are being paid to teach?"
Because many of the people being paid to teach in today's universities don't teach. Some barely speak the english language. And have only 2 hours a week of office hours for 190 students in the lecture hall. Their solution at my university? The "tutorial center", which is essentially grad students acting as tutors (this was mainly for mathematics courses that were required for a CS degree). The CS Dept was heavily math professor-influenced, and the math motto generally was "no one ever solved a problem by himself in math".
At any rate, remembering the kind of ridiculusly easy tasks that were assigned in intro to comp sci, if I got caught asking for help, I would probably be so embarassed that I would leave the university on my own.
It has never been grey. It's rather black and white: http://www.jcp.org/
It's just a different way of doing business. The OSS community provides one extreme, Microsoft provides the other extreme. Sun's has something that balances compatability, remuneration, and the free sharing/modification of information.
It's certainly flawed, looking at all the spats with Apache. But there's genuine interest in making it work.
I really don't get what you mean by "lawyers all over the place". The situaiton here is nothing like what happened to ADA -- Java is already heavily entrenched in the enterprise.
Your concern that Java will begin to decline in 2002 leads me to ask a pragmatic question: replaced by what?.NET? Perl, Python, Ruby?
"you miss out on many concepts and ideas by getting the solution from others rather than developing it on your own."
I disagree. I can get those concepts from someone else.
"Again, it is the general skills which will benefit you years down the road, not specific solutions gleaned from other people."
Of course, and I'm not just looking for specific solutions. That's what people automatically assume collaboration is. I believe collaboration is about learning the same stuff that can be done with a brute force approach -- but saving time and moving on to more pressing problems.
As long I understand the answer IN CONTEXT to the problem, i.e. understanding the systemic thought processes involved, I've learned what I need to learn.
Obviously creativity & problem solving are important and there are certain problems that should be solved from first principles. But most problems do not need to be solved this way, and I can learn just as well if they weren't.
"But as a novice, learning how to figure things out for yourself is a very important part of the learning process."
To a certain extent, I agree. But the question is whether it's inappropriate to be guided through that.
Given a question, I can do it on my own, or get a friend to show me how. I disagree that the latter approach is wrong, so long I understand how it works.
Certainly there's something to be said about mental exercise & thinking in creative ways to solve problems, and that's important to be exercised. I just think it's over-emphasized.
I've found I had a lot of problems early in university doing math problems on my own. But after learning from others how they do things, I'm much better now at solving things on my own from first principles, because I developed the thought patterns needed to do that. I didn't have them when I entered university, for some reason (though I did have them in other subject areas).
I have a different learning style than what the university wants me to have, and it's frustrating if I can't figure things out in the way best suited to me... even if that takes time.
I've seen a lot of posts suggesting two defenses for the university:
a) he can collaborate, but he has to CITE his references b) he can't collaborate because they want to weed people out that can't do the work on their own.
(A) isn't really applicable in this case because of the university's anti-collaboration policy (as far as I can tell). If it were the case, I'd agree with the university, citations are important.
But (B) is bullshit.
There is this pervading attitude that if you didn't put in the EFFORT into solving the problem, then you can't have learned it or somehow your learning experience is "diluted".
Results are all that matters. Excessive effort is for masochists and bleeding hearts ("but boss, I worked all weekend!").
If I ask someone a question, and they explain to me how they got the ansewr, and I incorporate that experience into my skills & knowledge, then I:
- probably can solve similar problems on my own - solved that problem - got what I needed out of the assignment (i.e. immediate answer and long term thought pattern to reach that answer).
The problem usually stems from people that just ask questions for the immediate answer and then refuse to incorporate that into their knowledge, they just want the quick grade.
That's unfortunate, but it's more indicative of the failure of examinations to catch such losers than of the evils of collaboration.
Once you leave university, you're going to be judged on what you produce -- not how you got there. If you leverage the knowledge of others, you're going to go farther. That's why design patterns are so popula -- so you don't have to solve things from first principles unless the situation is truly unique and warrants such an analysis.
If universities are institutions of higher learning, I really don't see a much in the way of modern pedagogy. As one person already said, they're more about indoctrination than learning. And for that reason (among others) they're not going to last much longer in their current form (give it a few decades).
Picasso once said: "Good artists borrow -- great artists steal."
" have made ABSOLUTELY NO EFFORT to find the answer on your own, then why should I put in any more effort to solve YOUR PROBLEM than you did?"
This is such bunk.
Every question asked in a CS program has been asked before, and been solved before. IF I ask someone answer & how they got there -- and procede to incorporate that lesson into my skills & knowledge, I have learned that lesson.
Results are all that matter. Effort is for masochists.
This is how the real world works btw. Once you get out of university, it's all about leveraging the knowledge of others. Which is why I see so many majors writing their own search algorithms and data structures because "dammit I don't want to use that stinkin' class library".
Universities that don't encourage collaboration are useless, imho.
J2EE is not EJB, and the ideas behind J2EE model really have nothing to do with MTS.
On the EJB hand, you're quite right, they borrowed heavily from MTS. But I would claim that MTS was beta-quality software until at least 2.0, and didn't support object pooling until COM+'s release. EJB 1.0 servers were doing that around the same time, and while many were crappy, there were production quality ones out by late 1998 (WL 4.5, Gemstone, Persistence, etc).
In the story of MTS vs. EJB, it really was a story of execution. MTS and COM+ were slow to mature, and didn't take off at all. Which is one of the driving factors behind.NET.
C# has value classes, operators, multidimensional arrays, and easy and efficient interfaces to native code.
JDK 1.5 is going to include autoboxing of primitives. Operators aren't going to happen, by design. Multi-dim arrays, not really important to those outside of high-performance computation. Easy trap-doors to native code is a plus for C#, yes.
And Sun really has a double standard there: when Apple exposes all their native platform APIs to Java, that's fine. It's just not fine when Microsoft does it
You're ignoring some proven facts here, such as smoking gun memo's from Microsoft executives ordering the "pollution of Java". Adding keywords & extensions were not violations of the contract -- breaking RMI and JNI, and not supporting JFC/Swing were violations. Apple didn't break compatibility; Microsoft did.
What can open source developers do with Java before Sun is going to try and sue them?
What can Slashdot readers do when someone who's on a rant starts spouting FUD? Drop the drama, please.
Today, it's a huge system with incompletely specified APIs, lousy support for high-performance computations, and no independent third party implementations (all compliant Java2 implementations depend to a large degree on Sun's source code).
How are the API's incompletely specified? How is high performance computation support "lousy" when most studies to this effect show that it's getting better every JDK release? And IBM's JDK is *not* dependent on any Sun code.
If Sun doesn't clean up its act quickly, after seven years of lobbying for Java and using it for lots of software, I'm dropping it.
It's one thing to be objectively critical of Sun's complex behavior. It's another to be venting frustration unobjectively. Guess which of the two you're doing.
- You're using J2EE. That implies you probably should be using JBuilder 6 Enterprise which has numerous J2EE features for automating configuration of EJB's. If you're not using the enterprise edition, then your comparison is lacking in credibility, as Visual Studio.NET enterprise edition is approximately the same price. - You have to edit four files to add a field to an EJB? Let me assume for a minute that you're using container managed persistence, which is the only scenario that would require such changes. Most tools will allow you to define the new field in your local interface, and will then propagate that field to your implementation class and your ejb-jar XML file. The second XML file, I will assume, is a custom deployment descriptor. Again, I would hope you're using a vendor's tool to manage this thing. But even if not, I find your indignaton towards all of this "work" somewhat amusing.
To put this tremendous amount of work in context, how much work does it take to add a field to a regular database table wtih a SQL call in JDBC, or for that matter, ADO.NET? That would require: - doing a DML statement on the table to add the column at easiest. In some environments this may require several DML statements to create the new table, re-populate it with old data, populate it with the new column's data, then drop the old table and rename the new one. - changing 1-2 method call signatures to take in extra parameters for inserts and updates. - changing the JDBC code for reading, updating, and inserting to take the new field into account - possibly adding the field to a data object that holds the data in memory.
Phew! I'm glad there's alternatives to EJB, it's so much easier without it.
Now, on to the next cow: Deploying a JAR to two different places (jBoss and Tomcat). Firstly, I question what the problem is. You would deploy an EJB JAR to a jBoss instance and a WAR to tomcat, or you could just put it into one big EAR file and fo'gettaboutit. If you have two servers, then the ant optional tasks package could very easily do this work for you with approximately 3 lines of XML configuration.
The best part about your post is that "there probably are better ways". Yes, there are. Hire a consultant for 3 or 4 hours to help you out, it will probably be worth the $1000+. If you're missing GUI tools for jBoss, that would be because it doesn't really have any. Use a commercial server if you're not willing to hand-craft your config & deployment.
Oracle vs postgres? jboss vs. weblogic? Simple: there's a lot of engineering effort that's been put into those products, and the market thinks they're worth that price. I think it's far too simplistic to state that the open source solutions are technically superior to the commercial ones. Cheaper, certainly. Technically competitive, sometimes (postgres in particular is getting good in this area, jBoss' next version looks promising as well).
But there are also significant questions to be raised about support and safety, especially with regards to mission critical systems. Many open source developers tend to sneer when an IT manager prefers Oracle to postgres, but Oracle's got good technical reputation for a reason -- it's different from most databases (though granted, postgreSQL shares many of oracle's qualities). Oracle also has a big consulting and training division that can help people -- they also have clear lead in the amount of books available describing the technology. There are advantages to this, and in the grand scheme of a project, $40-300k on Oracle is significant but not THAT much if the lifetime of the app is to be over several years.
On another point, somehow I think there are more WebLogic developers out there and a bigger support org than jBoss... just look at the volume of messages on the BEA newsgroup archives. There's something to be said for the number of users of a platform improving its stability and maturity.
Look, I think postgres and jBoss are great products, and this isn't entirely directed at your message which I see as genuinely trying to support technology that deserves a chance in corporate america without being dismissed out of hand as some snobs do. It infuriates me when managers or architects throw out open source solutions because they don't understand the philosophy or are frightened by it. I once had a manager throw out a PHP+Postgres+Linux+PHPSlash solution for a major website because he didn't "get" why people wrote software for free and didn't trust it. The people who wrote it were co-op students who were used to writing things with Linux and PHP because they're college students and use what's available to them. But in the end it was re-written in JSP+Struts+Java. The Java site is up now and really is probably more sophisticated than what we originally had, but it took 3 times longer to write.
But, having said that, I am noticing a disturbing and growing sense of arrogance on the part of open source solutions advocates, particularly on the jBoss side, where there's little appreciation for the amount of effort and quality that goes into the commercial competitors out there (WebLogic, iPlanet, Borland, etc.), and just a cavalier attitude of "we're better and we're free, you're dumb if you don't use us". I don't buy it. jBoss is nice, but so is Orion, and a bunch of other servers. This isn't going to win the hearts & minds of commercial developers....
..this is all stuff that LISP has had for a while too, and more recently Java with AspectJ... where it's called 'aspect oriented programming'.
the only problem with C++ policy oriented programming as i see it, which is similar to stuff talked about in Czarnecki's Generative Programming book, is that the amount of cognitive engagement one has to have when generally programming with C++ or C++ templates for that matter is just astounding. The syntactical complexities and programmatic options available are pretty difficult to deal with... I like it to developing COM with straight C++ and now ATL... it's conceptually clean, but your eyes have to wade through a lot of noise to see the patterns.
Another analogy would be those garbled/noise paintings that have the sailboat buried inside them if you just look at them the right way... some people, normal/smart people at that, just can't see the sailboat.
Won't anyone stop and possibly think: maybe this isn't a ZDNet-FUD story, or a clueless journalist, but maybe a practitioner with a point?
There seems to be a tremendously insular mindset here on Slashdot... Java and.NET have little relevance here, whereas C and C++ maintain their positions as the "true" languages.
The majority of software developers and software development work gets performed today in large corporations in industries like financial, insurance, manufacturing, utilties, pharmaceuticals, defense, real estate, retail, etc. 90% of this work is effectively about writing something that talks to a database somewhere for operational or decision support (reporting) purposes.
The culture of these companies is tremendously insular with regards to technological change. Here's a quick'n'dirty view of what tools are used generally out there, all IMHO:
up until 1998: C++ (MFC, COM, UNIX), pick a 4GL (VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi), some Perl, tinkerings with Java, some niche technologies (WebObjects, Smalltalk, Lisp), and mainframe legacy (COBOL, fortran, etc.)
past 1998: more Java, C++/COM going well, C++ UNIX going legacy, VB holding steady, Perl growing, other 4GLs going legacy, niche technologies being replaced with prior mentioned technologies, mainframe legacy being retrofitted for Y2K
2002: Lots of Java, steady amounts of Perl & PHP, VB is legacy, C++ is legacy (COM and UNIX), some niche technologies remain but are targetted to be 'sunsetted', mainframe legacy systems in place but some are looking to be replaced with Java systems. Growing interest in.NET -- lots of training gigs, but very few consulting pilots yet.
ANSI-C doesn't really enter into the picture. The #1 one criteria for choosing a technology in these businesses (usually) is how easy/quick can it talk to a relational database. Java's past performance problems are largely irrelevant today -- this language is running billions of dollars of transactions a day through thousands of companies. It works, and it's fast enough for most purposes.
You may not agree with this picture, but it has been my experience as a senior consultant to many different companies throughout the world, and working for a company that is a Microsoft.NET national trainer. I don't think I'm alone in looking at these figures. Let me be very clear: The greatness of open source development is that none of this really matters. If you love a language, use it. The marketshare of a language really has no effect on whether you can use it to write good software, it really only speaks of the probability of getting a job or contract using a particular programming language and working as a custom software developer.
Remember: my assumption is that the custom software marketplace is very conservative in the technologies it chooses because of the maintainance costs involved. So you see less diversity in using niche technologies unless a group with complex needs (i.e. an OODBMS in Smalltalk, or an expert system in LISP) shells out the extra $$ to get it done. Most systems just aren't written that way. If I'm wrong on this, if Goldman Sachs or Johnson & Johnson or Royal Dutch/Shell are really building most of their next projects spread over hundreds, if not thousands of developers -- all with ANSI-C, then I sit corrected.
The author of this article is making an important point, though he didn't qualify it properly enough... language diversity is drying up in the custom software development market..
This year, if you look at "growth", i.e. what languages are being used for new projects, there are only three major players: Java (mainly JSP/Servlet based), VB, and Perl (for backoffice automation), with other scripting languages like PHP and Python and Ruby in Japan doing smaller projects.
In 2003, there will be more.NET in that equation. The author's prediction of a 50/50.NET/J2EE split is silly. More realistically, by late 2003, mid-2004 I would suggest:
50% J2EE 30% VB, C++, Perl, Python, etc. 20%.NET.
Eventually.NET may grow to overtake the other languages, but I wouldn't bet on it until 2004 at best, no matter what the hype. It's a conservative industry, and not even Java, the current adoption rate record holder, was adopted as fast as some think.NET will be.
The problem that Java introduced, and one that will be compounded is that if.NET catches on, there is a problem that the JVM or the CLR does not have a design that allows for true language innovation. We're stuck at extracting and sharing "design patterns" to patch all the shitholes we find in our languages instead of inventing new langauges to fix these problems.
Sure, many people in this forum will point to implementations of ML, Haskell, LISP and Smalltalk on.NET. They won't point you to the absolutely horrendous performance problems of porting languages to.NET if they don't walk & talk like C#. This is where the "skinnable language" concept comes from... the CLR shipped with Windows is optimized for statically typed object oriented imperative ALGOL-like languages, C# and VB.NET in particular. You're not going to run Lisp, ML, Haskell, Self, Smalltalk on them with reasonable performance without a) bastardizing the language and b) using the.NET base class libraries & foregoing the libraries that ship with your language (a major hinderence for Common Lisp and Smalltalk, I'd say).
I have a great interest in programming language innovations.... life isn't getting any simpler, and our programming languages are going to have to start looking more like Ruby, Python, Smalltalk or eventually even Lisp if we're going to be handling the burgeoning complexity that's out there. I get frustrated when BigCo's set the agenda with their marketing pushes and the industry sits still for yet another 5 years... until the next hype wave rolls through. We're going to have more failed projects, more long hours, and more stressed-out/cynical developers because language design isn't keeping pace with the rising complexity of problems we're trying to solve.
While Java did a lot to bring some innovations like garbage collection to the mainstream in 1996... we should me moving beyond this... unfortunately and.NET is sealing us into another 5 years of the status quo.
disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. take with grain of salt.
"VB.Net is completely useless for the majority of software being developed"
The majority of *programmers* are VB programmers according to the last 4 years of programmer surveys by Giga and Gartner. COBOL is 2nd, C++ is 3rd. Java is trailing in 4th.
VB creates the most software out there: those hidden custom applications that you never see that run the backoffices of your banks, utilities, and insurance companies. It's changing, there's a lot more Java out there than before, and a lot more web based stuff, but this is just reality once you move beyond the ISV world.
The author of this article is looking at the aggregate software community which is primarily made up of business developers.... C programmers aren't the majority of these.
I'm not a Sun lover, they make major mistakes, but I'm not going to sit by idly while you spout total horse shit FUD.
1. They claimed that the blackdown port of Java to linux was theirs!
That was a temporary misstatement and was rectified quite quickly.
They "adopted" the free and entirely non-sun code base for Java Servlets (Jakarta) and claimed it was the "Sun Reference Platform"
Tomcat was lead by a Sun employee. The codebase was initially donated by Sun. It's quite distinct from the original Apache JServ project.
3. They "adopted" and FSCKED UP ROYALLY the XML4J/LotusXSL stuff that IBM had created and mangled out that god-forsaken peice of crap known as JAXP.
Sun never touched LotusXSL or XML4J. XML4J became Xerces 1.x. JAXP was original based on Project X parser which later evolved into Crimson. Crimson was an adequate parser, but Xerces 2.x is now better and is standard with JAXP 1.2 EA1. I question how JAXP is a piece of crap when it's just a thin portability layer on top of the standard SAX, DOM, or TRaX api's.
. At one time, Scott McNealy admitted that Sun had indeed been the brainchild behind XML.
Most of the work on the XML spec was led by Sun payrolled employees, in particular John Bosak.
5. They ask ECMA to rubber-stamp their Java Language as an offical standard, but allow SUN to keep all rights for licensing and changing the language as they wish. ECMA tells them to "get bent" and SUN goes off sulking to anyone who will listen. Java still remains in the hands of the nutters who thought it up.
Java is young and Sun isn't necessarily doing a bad thing when it keeps tight control of that language, especially given the Microsoft J++ problems of yesteryear.
Open sourcing a technology is NOT a guaranteed means of success or astounding adoption. C and C++ weren't originally "open source" languages, they were written by corporations before GCC came out. They became successful on their own merits. Out of the "in bred" open source langauges, only Perl has achieved mass acceptance.
It seems that from a cursory glance, SUN has done many things to piss off the Java and the Opensource crowds.
In one context, I agree that Sun's PR is horrible. They just can't seem to make their minds up with how they want J2EE to be perceived and what role the Jakarta projects should play in that picture. The reality is there is too big of a Tomcat installed base and too many Sun employees that lead Jakarta projects for Sun to unilaterally "hate" Jakarta or to ignore it. The real-world adoption of kits like Log4J and Struts is astoundingly rapid.
BUT, the other traditional bone-of-contention -- the fact that Java isn't GPL -- generally doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference to the world. If it becomes GPL one day, great... I really (and I would venture that most existing Java developers) don't care too much about this either way, we can see the source code, change it for internal purposes without restriction, and that's all I'm concerned with.
The issue of J2EE licensing fees is somewhat of a sour grapes issue to me, it comes down to a traditionally contentious issue with the open source community: open source software usually implies a desire free beer zero-price software.
"But they guys who created those 1996 apps will be doing just fine maintaining them."
Sure. There will always be a need for specialists or just "war horses" that stay in areas of organizational inertia. Certain systems don't need to evolve all that much beyond 20+ year old technology. But a *lot* of COBOL people upgraded their skills.
My point was that a 1996 application is something like a web browser, or web-based enterprise system, both tremendously more complex in plumbing than mainframe applications of the 1970's (note i didn't say business logic complexity which was obviously the reason why we still use these systems -- stuff like XML parsing, HTML code generation, object orientation, etc. is a lot more complex than batch, and a bit more complex than CICIS).
Complexity increases, so skills need to increase...and they do. So I don't see how low wagers are going to flood everything. Maybe for simple applications. Not the complex ones..
Slashdot Mirror
It's an abstraction. There are quantitative growth theories that have a lot of merit.
"This "market cycle" stuff is bullshit."
The economic history of both Europe and America over the past several centuries would disagree with you.
The business cycle / market cycle, in goods, services, and jobs, is an observable phenomenon, mainly due to the complex nature of the economy. You can't point the finger at a single entity to blame for all your woes; that would be too easy.
DVI is a standard. It works on PC's.l ?i=1577
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.htm
VGA is a technology that's almost 15 years old. Shouldn't a company dedicated to high-end graphical design want to push the envelope here a little, even if it means using a little teeny (free) dongle to adapt back to VGA?
This argument is almost as asine as suggesting that one shouldn't have to put up with thos stupid AC adapters, why can't they be built into the case?
Look at J2EE and you'll see most of the "innovations" in ASP.NET are really just bringing it up to par with the base line J2EE implementations out there. Clustered session management is old hat. User & server controls have been out in Java since 1999 with JSP tag libraries. Ever try writing a custom control in .NET? See you in 2004. It's not easy, compared to tag libs.
As for drag 'n drop, I'd really like you to build a production website with drag 'n drop. Really. Graphic designers everywhere are hanging up their BBEdits forever as we speak.
I would suggest there's a big difference between design integrity and purity. Java has a certain philosophy of what languages should be, where certain tradeoffs should be made, and it sticks to it. There's a significant amount of cognitive predictability in the language, it doesn't include "trap doors" to change the meaning or intent of well-known constructs such as operators, primitive (naturally "value") types, and reference/object types. One may complain that primitive types should be transparently viewed as reference types (the "autoboxing" argument), and that's a valid concern, probably to be addressed by Java 1.5.
"Early drafts are pratically identical to "The Hidden Fortress""
I just re-watched the Hidden Fortress recently, saw Lucas' interview on the Criterion disc discussing how it influenced him. Considering the final Star Wars really isn't that similar to The Hidden Fortress, I question the above statement.
Lucas took the 2 comic sidekicks of the movie and turned them into the Droids. And there was a princess being smuggled somewhere.
Cheers
Stu
"You're implying a lot of neurological theory here that doesn't necessarily exist"
:)
Probably not in that field. I'm talking about pedogagical theory that does exist: that people have different learning styles, and some can't learn very well without collaboration.
That's a good explanation of what it means to be proramming, btw. Bubbles 'n' lines never help much.
Fair enough, I think you've probably provided a counter argument I can agree with.
I think this lack of reality probably is going to really hurt, if not completely transform, colleges in the long run. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." --Philip K. Dick
I'm not suggesting that everyone verbatim copy code. I'm suggesting that hindering collaboration is limiting learning in an unacceptable way.
Obviously if someone can't do the work by themselves, they're incompetent. I'm concerned about the thought that it's somehow superior learning experience if someone learned how to do it by themselves through their own experimentation vs. asking someone for help the 1st and 2nd time, and then incorporating that lesson so they could to it themselves from then on. That's what collaboration is about.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
:)
"There is a fine line between peer tutoring and cheating. I can say, as someone who is often approached for help, that there are two types of people who seek help. The first type are those just looking for an answer. The second are those who are actually looking to understand an answer."
I agree with this completely. My view is that the second type of person shouldn't be penalized because the first type of person exists.
The university I attended was the opposite of Georgia Tech: they told us on day 1 that if we didn't collaborate with our peers on our assignments or visit the tutors, WE WOULD FAIL. So it's striking to me the difference in philosophy.
"I have to imagine that most students go to other students--as opposed to going to a professor--in order to receive an answer. Really, why would you pay to goto a university if you are not learning from the people who are being paid to teach?"
Because many of the people being paid to teach in today's universities don't teach. Some barely speak the english language. And have only 2 hours a week of office hours for 190 students in the lecture hall. Their solution at my university? The "tutorial center", which is essentially grad students acting as tutors (this was mainly for mathematics courses that were required for a CS degree). The CS Dept was heavily math professor-influenced, and the math motto generally was "no one ever solved a problem by himself in math".
At any rate, remembering the kind of ridiculusly easy tasks that were assigned in intro to comp sci, if I got caught asking for help, I would probably be so embarassed that I would leave the university on my own.
This is highly dependent on your university.
It has never been grey. It's rather black and white: http://www.jcp.org/
.NET? Perl, Python, Ruby?
It's just a different way of doing business. The OSS community provides one extreme, Microsoft provides the other extreme. Sun's has something that balances compatability, remuneration, and the free sharing/modification of information.
It's certainly flawed, looking at all the spats with Apache. But there's genuine interest in making it work.
I really don't get what you mean by "lawyers all over the place". The situaiton here is nothing like what happened to ADA -- Java is already heavily entrenched in the enterprise.
Your concern that Java will begin to decline in 2002 leads me to ask a pragmatic question: replaced by what?
"you miss out on many concepts and ideas by getting the solution from others rather than developing it on your own."
I disagree. I can get those concepts from someone else.
"Again, it is the general skills which will benefit you years down the road, not specific solutions gleaned from other people."
Of course, and I'm not just looking for specific solutions. That's what people automatically assume collaboration is. I believe collaboration is about learning the same stuff that can be done with a brute force approach -- but saving time and moving on to more pressing problems.
As long I understand the answer IN CONTEXT to the problem, i.e. understanding the systemic thought processes involved, I've learned what I need to learn.
Obviously creativity & problem solving are important and there are certain problems that should be solved from first principles. But most problems do not need to be solved this way, and I can learn just as well if they weren't.
"But as a novice, learning how to figure things out for yourself is a very important part of the learning process."
To a certain extent, I agree. But the question is whether it's inappropriate to be guided through that.
Given a question, I can do it on my own, or get a friend to show me how. I disagree that the latter approach is wrong, so long I understand how it works.
Certainly there's something to be said about mental exercise & thinking in creative ways to solve problems, and that's important to be exercised. I just think it's over-emphasized.
I've found I had a lot of problems early in university doing math problems on my own. But after learning from others how they do things, I'm much better now at solving things on my own from first principles, because I developed the thought patterns needed to do that. I didn't have them when I entered university, for some reason (though I did have them in other subject areas).
I have a different learning style than what the university wants me to have, and it's frustrating if I can't figure things out in the way best suited to me... even if that takes time.
I've seen a lot of posts suggesting two defenses for the university:
a) he can collaborate, but he has to CITE his references
b) he can't collaborate because they want to weed people out that can't do the work on their own.
(A) isn't really applicable in this case because of the university's anti-collaboration policy (as far as I can tell). If it were the case, I'd agree with the university, citations are important.
But (B) is bullshit.
There is this pervading attitude that if you didn't put in the EFFORT into solving the problem, then you can't have learned it or somehow your learning experience is "diluted".
Results are all that matters. Excessive effort is for masochists and bleeding hearts ("but boss, I worked all weekend!").
If I ask someone a question, and they explain to me how they got the ansewr, and I incorporate that experience into my skills & knowledge, then I:
- probably can solve similar problems on my own
- solved that problem
- got what I needed out of the assignment (i.e. immediate answer and long term thought pattern to reach that answer).
The problem usually stems from people that just ask questions for the immediate answer and then refuse to incorporate that into their knowledge, they just want the quick grade.
That's unfortunate, but it's more indicative of the failure of examinations to catch such losers than of the evils of collaboration.
Once you leave university, you're going to be judged on what you produce -- not how you got there. If you leverage the knowledge of others, you're going to go farther. That's why design patterns are so popula -- so you don't have to solve things from first principles unless the situation is truly unique and warrants such an analysis.
If universities are institutions of higher learning, I really don't see a much in the way of modern pedagogy. As one person already said, they're more about indoctrination than learning. And for that reason (among others) they're not going to last much longer in their current form (give it a few decades).
Picasso once said: "Good artists borrow -- great artists steal."
" have made ABSOLUTELY NO EFFORT to find the answer on your own, then why should I put in any more effort to solve YOUR PROBLEM than you did?"
This is such bunk.
Every question asked in a CS program has been asked before, and been solved before. IF I ask someone answer & how they got there -- and procede to incorporate that lesson into my skills & knowledge, I have learned that lesson.
Results are all that matter. Effort is for masochists.
This is how the real world works btw. Once you get out of university, it's all about leveraging the knowledge of others. Which is why I see so many majors writing their own search algorithms and data structures because "dammit I don't want to use that stinkin' class library".
Universities that don't encourage collaboration are useless, imho.
J2EE is not EJB, and the ideas behind J2EE model really have nothing to do with MTS.
.NET.
On the EJB hand, you're quite right, they borrowed heavily from MTS. But I would claim that MTS was beta-quality software until at least 2.0, and didn't support object pooling until COM+'s release. EJB 1.0 servers were doing that around the same time, and while many were crappy, there were production quality ones out by late 1998 (WL 4.5, Gemstone, Persistence, etc).
In the story of MTS vs. EJB, it really was a story of execution. MTS and COM+ were slow to mature, and didn't take off at all. Which is one of the driving factors behind
C# has value classes, operators, multidimensional arrays, and easy and efficient interfaces to native code.
JDK 1.5 is going to include autoboxing of primitives. Operators aren't going to happen, by design. Multi-dim arrays, not really important to those outside of high-performance computation. Easy trap-doors to native code is a plus for C#, yes.
And Sun really has a double standard there: when Apple exposes all their native platform APIs to Java, that's fine. It's just not fine when Microsoft does it
You're ignoring some proven facts here, such as smoking gun memo's from Microsoft executives ordering the "pollution of Java". Adding keywords & extensions were not violations of the contract -- breaking RMI and JNI, and not supporting JFC/Swing were violations. Apple didn't break compatibility; Microsoft did.
What can open source developers do with Java before Sun is going to try and sue them?
What can Slashdot readers do when someone who's on a rant starts spouting FUD? Drop the drama, please.
Today, it's a huge system with incompletely specified APIs, lousy support for high-performance computations, and no independent third party implementations (all compliant Java2 implementations depend to a large degree on Sun's source code).
How are the API's incompletely specified?
How is high performance computation support "lousy" when most studies to this effect show that it's getting better every JDK release?
And IBM's JDK is *not* dependent on any Sun code.
If Sun doesn't clean up its act quickly, after seven years of lobbying for Java and using it for lots of software, I'm dropping it.
It's one thing to be objectively critical of Sun's complex behavior. It's another to be venting frustration unobjectively. Guess which of the two you're doing.
- You're using J2EE. That implies you probably should be using JBuilder 6 Enterprise which has numerous J2EE features for automating configuration of EJB's. If you're not using the enterprise edition, then your comparison is lacking in credibility, as Visual Studio .NET enterprise edition is approximately the same price.
- You have to edit four files to add a field to an EJB? Let me assume for a minute that you're using container managed persistence, which is the only scenario that would require such changes. Most tools will allow you to define the new field in your local interface, and will then propagate that field to your implementation class and your ejb-jar XML file. The second XML file, I will assume, is a custom deployment descriptor. Again, I would hope you're using a vendor's tool to manage this thing. But even if not, I find your indignaton towards all of this "work" somewhat amusing.
To put this tremendous amount of work in context, how much work does it take to add a field to a regular database table wtih a SQL call in JDBC, or for that matter, ADO.NET? That would require:
- doing a DML statement on the table to add the column at easiest. In some environments this may require several DML statements to create the new table, re-populate it with old data, populate it with the new column's data, then drop the old table and rename the new one.
- changing 1-2 method call signatures to take in extra parameters for inserts and updates.
- changing the JDBC code for reading, updating, and inserting to take the new field into account
- possibly adding the field to a data object that holds the data in memory.
Phew! I'm glad there's alternatives to EJB, it's so much easier without it.
Now, on to the next cow:
Deploying a JAR to two different places (jBoss and Tomcat). Firstly, I question what the problem is. You would deploy an EJB JAR to a jBoss instance and a WAR to tomcat, or you could just put it into one big EAR file and fo'gettaboutit. If you have two servers, then the ant optional tasks package could very easily do this work for you with approximately 3 lines of XML configuration.
The best part about your post is that "there probably are better ways". Yes, there are. Hire a consultant for 3 or 4 hours to help you out, it will probably be worth the $1000+. If you're missing GUI tools for jBoss, that would be because it doesn't really have any. Use a commercial server if you're not willing to hand-craft your config & deployment.
Why pay for:
Oracle vs postgres? jboss vs. weblogic? Simple: there's a lot of engineering effort that's been put into those products, and the market thinks they're worth that price. I think it's far too simplistic to state that the open source solutions are technically superior to the commercial ones. Cheaper, certainly. Technically competitive, sometimes (postgres in particular is getting good in this area, jBoss' next version looks promising as well).
But there are also significant questions to be raised about support and safety, especially with regards to mission critical systems. Many open source developers tend to sneer when an IT manager prefers Oracle to postgres, but Oracle's got good technical reputation for a reason -- it's different from most databases (though granted, postgreSQL shares many of oracle's qualities). Oracle also has a big consulting and training division that can help people -- they also have clear lead in the amount of books available describing the technology. There are advantages to this, and in the grand scheme of a project, $40-300k on Oracle is significant but not THAT much if the lifetime of the app is to be over several years.
On another point, somehow I think there are more WebLogic developers out there and a bigger support org than jBoss... just look at the volume of messages on the BEA newsgroup archives. There's something to be said for the number of users of a platform improving its stability and maturity.
Look, I think postgres and jBoss are great products, and this isn't entirely directed at your message which I see as genuinely trying to support technology that deserves a chance in corporate america without being dismissed out of hand as some snobs do. It infuriates me when managers or architects throw out open source solutions because they don't understand the philosophy or are frightened by it. I once had a manager throw out a PHP+Postgres+Linux+PHPSlash solution for a major website because he didn't "get" why people wrote software for free and didn't trust it. The people who wrote it were co-op students who were used to writing things with Linux and PHP because they're college students and use what's available to them. But in the end it was re-written in JSP+Struts+Java. The Java site is up now and really is probably more sophisticated than what we originally had, but it took 3 times longer to write.
But, having said that, I am noticing a disturbing and growing sense of arrogance on the part of open source solutions advocates, particularly on the jBoss side, where there's little appreciation for the amount of effort and quality that goes into the commercial competitors out there (WebLogic, iPlanet, Borland, etc.), and just a cavalier attitude of "we're better and we're free, you're dumb if you don't use us". I don't buy it. jBoss is nice, but so is Orion, and a bunch of other servers. This isn't going to win the hearts & minds of commercial developers....
Anyhow, just a rant.
..this is all stuff that LISP has had for a while too, and more recently Java with AspectJ... where it's called 'aspect oriented programming'.
the only problem with C++ policy oriented programming as i see it, which is similar to stuff talked about in Czarnecki's Generative Programming book, is that the amount of cognitive engagement one has to have when generally programming with C++ or C++ templates for that matter is just astounding. The syntactical complexities and programmatic options available are pretty difficult to deal with... I like it to developing COM with straight C++ and now ATL... it's conceptually clean, but your eyes have to wade through a lot of noise to see the patterns.
Another analogy would be those garbled/noise paintings that have the sailboat buried inside them if you just look at them the right way... some people, normal/smart people at that, just can't see the sailboat.
Won't anyone stop and possibly think: maybe this isn't a ZDNet-FUD story, or a clueless journalist, but maybe a practitioner with a point?
.NET have little relevance here, whereas C and C++ maintain their positions as the "true" languages.
.NET -- lots of training gigs, but very few consulting pilots yet.
.NET national trainer. I don't think I'm alone in looking at these figures. Let me be very clear: The greatness of open source development is that none of this really matters. If you love a language, use it. The marketshare of a language really has no effect on whether you can use it to write good software, it really only speaks of the probability of getting a job or contract using a particular programming language and working as a custom software developer.
.NET in that equation. The author's prediction of a 50/50 .NET/J2EE split is silly. More realistically, by late 2003, mid-2004 I would suggest:
.NET.
.NET may grow to overtake the other languages, but I wouldn't bet on it until 2004 at best, no matter what the hype. It's a conservative industry, and not even Java, the current adoption rate record holder, was adopted as fast as some think .NET will be.
.NET catches on, there is a problem that the JVM or the CLR does not have a design that allows for true language innovation. We're stuck at extracting and sharing "design patterns" to patch all the shitholes we find in our languages instead of inventing new langauges to fix these problems.
.NET. They won't point you to the absolutely horrendous performance problems of porting languages to .NET if they don't walk & talk like C#. This is where the "skinnable language" concept comes from... the CLR shipped with Windows is optimized for statically typed object oriented imperative ALGOL-like languages, C# and VB.NET in particular. You're not going to run Lisp, ML, Haskell, Self, Smalltalk on them with reasonable performance without a) bastardizing the language and b) using the .NET base class libraries & foregoing the libraries that ship with your language (a major hinderence for Common Lisp and Smalltalk, I'd say).
.NET is sealing us into another 5 years of the status quo.
There seems to be a tremendously insular mindset here on Slashdot... Java and
The majority of software developers and software development work gets performed today in large corporations in industries like financial, insurance, manufacturing, utilties, pharmaceuticals, defense, real estate, retail, etc. 90% of this work is effectively about writing something that talks to a database somewhere for operational or decision support (reporting) purposes.
The culture of these companies is tremendously insular with regards to technological change. Here's a quick'n'dirty view of what tools are used generally out there, all IMHO:
up until 1998:
C++ (MFC, COM, UNIX), pick a 4GL (VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi), some Perl, tinkerings with Java, some niche technologies (WebObjects, Smalltalk, Lisp), and mainframe legacy (COBOL, fortran, etc.)
past 1998:
more Java, C++/COM going well, C++ UNIX going legacy, VB holding steady, Perl growing, other 4GLs going legacy, niche technologies being replaced with prior mentioned technologies, mainframe legacy being retrofitted for Y2K
2002:
Lots of Java, steady amounts of Perl & PHP, VB is legacy, C++ is legacy (COM and UNIX), some niche technologies remain but are targetted to be 'sunsetted', mainframe legacy systems in place but some are looking to be replaced with Java systems. Growing interest in
ANSI-C doesn't really enter into the picture. The #1 one criteria for choosing a technology in these businesses (usually) is how easy/quick can it talk to a relational database. Java's past performance problems are largely irrelevant today -- this language is running billions of dollars of transactions a day through thousands of companies. It works, and it's fast enough for most purposes.
You may not agree with this picture, but it has been my experience as a senior consultant to many different companies throughout the world, and working for a company that is a Microsoft
Remember: my assumption is that the custom software marketplace is very conservative in the technologies it chooses because of the maintainance costs involved. So you see less diversity in using niche technologies unless a group with complex needs (i.e. an OODBMS in Smalltalk, or an expert system in LISP) shells out the extra $$ to get it done. Most systems just aren't written that way. If I'm wrong on this, if Goldman Sachs or Johnson & Johnson or Royal Dutch/Shell are really building most of their next projects spread over hundreds, if not thousands of developers -- all with ANSI-C, then I sit corrected.
The author of this article is making an important point, though he didn't qualify it properly enough... language diversity is drying up in the custom software development market..
This year, if you look at "growth", i.e. what languages are being used for new projects, there are only three major players: Java (mainly JSP/Servlet based), VB, and Perl (for backoffice automation), with other scripting languages like PHP and Python and Ruby in Japan doing smaller projects.
In 2003, there will be more
50% J2EE
30% VB, C++, Perl, Python, etc.
20%
Eventually
The problem that Java introduced, and one that will be compounded is that if
Sure, many people in this forum will point to implementations of ML, Haskell, LISP and Smalltalk on
I have a great interest in programming language innovations.... life isn't getting any simpler, and our programming languages are going to have to start looking more like Ruby, Python, Smalltalk or eventually even Lisp if we're going to be handling the burgeoning complexity that's out there. I get frustrated when BigCo's set the agenda with their marketing pushes and the industry sits still for yet another 5 years... until the next hype wave rolls through. We're going to have more failed projects, more long hours, and more stressed-out/cynical developers because language design isn't keeping pace with the rising complexity of problems we're trying to solve.
While Java did a lot to bring some innovations like garbage collection to the mainstream in 1996... we should me moving beyond this... unfortunately and
disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. take with grain of salt.
"VB.Net is completely useless for the majority of software being developed"
The majority of *programmers* are VB programmers according to the last 4 years of programmer surveys by Giga and Gartner. COBOL is 2nd, C++ is 3rd. Java is trailing in 4th.
VB creates the most software out there: those hidden custom applications that you never see that run the backoffices of your banks, utilities, and insurance companies. It's changing, there's a lot more Java out there than before, and a lot more web based stuff, but this is just reality once you move beyond the ISV world.
The author of this article is looking at the aggregate software community which is primarily made up of business developers.... C programmers aren't the majority of these.
I'm not a Sun lover, they make major mistakes, but I'm not going to sit by idly while you spout total horse shit FUD.
1. They claimed that the blackdown port of Java to linux was theirs!
That was a temporary misstatement and was rectified quite quickly.
They "adopted" the free and entirely non-sun code base for Java Servlets (Jakarta) and claimed it was the "Sun Reference Platform"
Tomcat was lead by a Sun employee. The codebase was initially donated by Sun. It's quite distinct from the original Apache JServ project.
3. They "adopted" and FSCKED UP ROYALLY the XML4J/LotusXSL stuff that IBM had created and mangled out that god-forsaken peice of crap known as JAXP.
Sun never touched LotusXSL or XML4J. XML4J became Xerces 1.x. JAXP was original based on Project X parser which later evolved into Crimson. Crimson was an adequate parser, but Xerces 2.x is now better and is standard with JAXP 1.2 EA1. I question how JAXP is a piece of crap when it's just a thin portability layer on top of the standard SAX, DOM, or TRaX api's.
. At one time, Scott McNealy admitted that Sun had indeed been the brainchild behind XML.
Most of the work on the XML spec was led by Sun payrolled employees, in particular John Bosak.
5. They ask ECMA to rubber-stamp their Java Language as an offical standard, but allow SUN to keep all rights for licensing and changing the language as they wish. ECMA tells them to "get bent" and SUN goes off sulking to anyone who will listen. Java still remains in the hands of the nutters who thought it up.
Java is young and Sun isn't necessarily doing a bad thing when it keeps tight control of that language, especially given the Microsoft J++ problems of yesteryear.
Open sourcing a technology is NOT a guaranteed means of success or astounding adoption. C and C++ weren't originally "open source" languages, they were written by corporations before GCC came out. They became successful on their own merits. Out of the "in bred" open source langauges, only Perl has achieved mass acceptance.
It seems that from a cursory glance, SUN has done many things to piss off the Java and the Opensource crowds.
In one context, I agree that Sun's PR is horrible. They just can't seem to make their minds up with how they want J2EE to be perceived and what role the Jakarta projects should play in that picture. The reality is there is too big of a Tomcat installed base and too many Sun employees that lead Jakarta projects for Sun to unilaterally "hate" Jakarta or to ignore it. The real-world adoption of kits like Log4J and Struts is astoundingly rapid.
BUT, the other traditional bone-of-contention -- the fact that Java isn't GPL -- generally doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference to the world. If it becomes GPL one day, great... I really (and I would venture that most existing Java developers) don't care too much about this either way, we can see the source code, change it for internal purposes without restriction, and that's all I'm concerned with.
The issue of J2EE licensing fees is somewhat of a sour grapes issue to me, it comes down to a traditionally contentious issue with the open source community: open source software usually implies a desire free beer zero-price software.
CodeNotes for J2EE tells you how to install Tomcat and I believe Cloudscape. Should be available pretty much anywhere.
(disclaimer: I wrote the book)
"But they guys who created those 1996 apps will be doing just fine maintaining them."
.and they do. So I don't see how low wagers are going to flood everything. Maybe for simple applications. Not the complex ones..
Sure. There will always be a need for specialists or just "war horses" that stay in areas of organizational inertia. Certain systems don't need to evolve all that much beyond 20+ year old technology. But a *lot* of COBOL people upgraded their skills.
My point was that a 1996 application is something like a web browser, or web-based enterprise system, both tremendously more complex in plumbing than mainframe applications of the 1970's (note i didn't say business logic complexity which was obviously the reason why we still use these systems -- stuff like XML parsing, HTML code generation, object orientation, etc. is a lot more complex than batch, and a bit more complex than CICIS).
Complexity increases, so skills need to increase..