I wasn't meaning to imply that you're a bad person. Nor was I trying to imply that you were sexist or a racist. I don't feel that you are responsible for every bad thing every white male has ever done for the history of the world.
I do think your knowledge of the world has been lacking though. Not your fault, just an artifact of the US education system. I think you would do well to look outside your clubhouse from time to time. What you see might disturb you if you have the courage not to flinch.
Have you heard the following names? Ida B. Wells? Frederick Douglas? A. Philip Randolph? W. E. B. DuBois? Emmett Till?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Black Student Union.
Have you heard the following names? Caesar Chavez? Gregorio Cortez? Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Latino Student Union.
Have you seen the movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" or "The Salt of the Earth?" Have you even heard of them?
The reason there is no White Student Union is because we all know who George Washington was. We all know who Napolean was. We all know Descartes, Lewis & Clark, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, and Davy Crockett. We learned of them and their significance in high school during US History and World History and Government and English etc.
If you did not know at least half the names I listed earlier in the post, you are getting an inkling of why a Black/Latino Student Union is useful. If you know more than half of the last group, you will be getting why a White Student Union is not.
Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anne Moody, etc. Know who they are? They are all examples of why a Woman's Student Union are needed.
Getting it now?
You are so firmly in a privileged position, you can't even visualize what it's like for others. You think your life is rough because you can't have a club like everyone else. THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS a White Student Union isn't necessary. A Student Union usually implies you are in an assailed position. If the only reason you want a White Student Union is so you and other white kids can hang out with each other and lick each other's wounded pride, that's a problem.
Go to the movie theater. Look at the movies listed. If the cast to a movie is more than 50% black, people usually consider it a "black movie." Ditto for latino. Ditto for east asian. However, take a movie like "Scream." Did you think that was a "white movie?" Of the movies out right now, how many have a non-white lead? One notable exception is the "Harold and Kumar" sequel: a movie all about being stereotyped based on ethnicity.
Start counting the number of each group, men, women, black, white, latino, east asian, indian, etc. If you can't see a bias in our society for whites -- especially white males -- you are blind.
I am very happy that you are following the troop ideals that I and many others encountered. Unfortunately, I'm not sure you are the norm anymore. You certainly are not representative of the national organization.
As a white student, were you barred from joining the Black Student Union? Were you barred from joining the Latino Student Union because you weren't latino? Does the NEA bar certain segments of society from taking advantage?
You are confusing "everyone must participate" with "everyone may participate."
While the Black Student Union may not have had you in mind at their formation, I would fight to the end to ensure that you could participate. You do not have to participate, but you may.
See the difference?
And for the record, I was in the Boy Scouts many years ago. I know exactly what the organization is/was about, and I know the impact it can make in a young man's life. I have also watched several scoutmasters and camp counselors jump ship as it became more radicalized in the last ten years.
And the US Constitution originally counted black slaves as 3/5 of a man, women couldn't vote, etc. It doesn't make it correct or moral.
If the BSA wants to deny any federal grants and other federal funding (my atheist tax dollars), then go for it. As it stands, they're taking my tax money, I and my family therefore deserve just as big a piece of the pie.
As for abiding by its religious tenets, these didn't appear to me as a young man as requirements. I was completely honest at the time that I was an atheist. No one seemed to mind. Not my scoutmaster, not my troopmates, no one. I didn't hide the fact, and I didn't try to shove it down other peoples' throats.
Suddenly this "moral lapse" became a major issue. Suddenly these atheists in the organization were a threat. The atheists had been in the organization for decades -- probably since the beginning -- but now suddenly there's a problem. There had been no pattern of atheist scouts fighting and stealing and cheating any more than the typical scout, but somehow now they are unworthy.
"On my honor..." Start there. Any organization that teaches that it is morally righteous to single out those who believe differently from them has no moral directive to teach our youth.
I asked in another thread, but I ask this of you separately now. I also was in the Scouts. I am over 30. The change many of us refer to has been dramatic and predominantly in the last ten years.
If you really want to test the theory, go and ask directly if you can be a scoutmaster and be an atheist. I'd honestly be curious what the response would be, and if the organization has become more moderate of late.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Every troop will be a little different, and they tend to be fairly autonomous, leading to abuses of power such as this.
However, the discussion was about the national organization and its policies. These organizational stances are the ones that I and others find so egregious.
It's the difference between some judge in a small town in the middle of nowhere suppressing free speech and the US Supreme Court suppressing free speech. Neither is good, but the latter is arguably a more serious matter as it sets the standard for millions, not just the inhabitants of a small town.
Would you accept the creation of an atheist organization that publicly excluded all Judeo-Christians? How about if it received tax dollars to do so? What if that organization allowed Christians, but only if they renounced God in front of their friends and family? Would you still just consider the whole affair as destroying that organization's rights?
What if their policy was no persons of Italian descent?
The simple fact of the matter is that atheism has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can pitch a tent in the rain, render first aid in an emergency, or be an effective leader. If the BSA's goal is in fact to foster theism, then they should call themselves a seminary school and be done with it.
As long as they get some of my tax dollars, they'd better damn well allow people like me to participate.
Last I checked, the US Army wasn't a private organization nor was it explicitly religious. Also, the armed forces are not always known for their fairness and decency: see Tailhook.
I think you missed the part where atheists had no problems to speak of in the Boy Scouts until about ten years ago. I'm an atheist, and I was in the Boy Scouts. So were many of my friends, also atheists and in the Scouts.
Being an Eagle Scout affords you certain advantages in getting into federal military academies, looks good on a resume, etc. People cite their scouting days in college applications to beneficial effect all the time.
Then the Mormon Church buys them out. Suddenly the organization doesn't just have religious overtones, it kicks kids out that have done nothing wrong aside from having different beliefs. Kids that bully others are talked to, put on probation, or otherwise given a second chance. An atheist kid is told to either lie about something so fundamental to each of us (yeah, great morals there) or get kicked out.
Let's be clear. We're not talking about someone trying to make the other kids into atheists. We're not talking about kids calling press conferences to get the BSA to change the scout oath. We're talking about an organization that changed under our feet and suddenly became a hostile entity.
Imagine you were black, had taken part in an organization that had white supremacy overtones, but everyone laughed it off, treated it like an unfortunate legacy. Imagine all of your experiences and your friendships were a shining moment in your life. Imagine you had taken part in fundraisers and paid dues to this organization.
Now imagine that one day the organization calls you a nigger and forces you out. Imagine the effort and time and money given to this organization, the fruits of your labor, are now forbidden to you and everyone like you.
Now imagine that someone on a random internet message board proclaims that the organization has that right since they always proclaimed white supremacy, but since they've also always received federal funds, your tax dollars continue to help fund the organization that's turned its back on you and everyone else like you.
But I guess that's just belly-aching, isn't it?
You can't hide being black, but you can lie about being an atheist. For a 10 year-old, to stand up and be honest about your beliefs is true strength, no matter what that faith may be. It's far easier to just go with the flow and "blend in."
For the organization, however, the moral issues are the same. Forbidding access to some for who they are rather than what they do is clearly morally reprehensible.
Except that BSA policy is to either have an atheist swear falsely to a belief in a deity or drop them for being honest.
"Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of character to refuse to swear falsely." Editorial, New York Times, 1993-DEC-12, commenting on the Boy Scouts' exclusion of a young Atheist.
There is a difference between proselytizing to convert other scouts to atheism and simply affirming that one is an atheist. Unfortunately the BSA sees no such distinction.
A Christian scout who steals, cheats, or fights will be given counseling, and an effort will be made to keep him in the fold provided he poses no imminent threat to others. An atheist scout who lives an exemplary life will be rejected unless he lies about his beliefs. How is this a moral example for young people?
Actually, interceptors are not specific to EJB 3.0, but nice try to divert attention from the main issue: Java has access to a feature that earlier was asserted it did not.
As for the number of hours the spec took to make, that is wholly irrelevant. The W3C CSS specs took far longer to make and many more hours than Netscape's layer approach in their 4.0 browser revision. That is a statement of effort, not of quality. If you want to assert that the quality of a particular interceptor implementation or the amount of time it takes to define an interceptor relative to Ruby, fine. But that wasn't the argument you just made.
As for a Ruby developer taking 10 minutes to produce the equivalent functionality, that may be true, but that does not mean it would take the Java developer much longer for the same task. That Ruby developer is taking advantage of many developer hours to make Ruby available, and Ruby also had the benefit of hindsight, being a younger language. If Ruby were older than Java and yet showed sufficient foresight to implement this feature, I'd be far more impressed.
Java, on the other hand, had to implement this feature in an accessible manner without breaking existing code. Now that this foundation has been laid -- not originally by Sun, by the way -- an admin or programmer can link primary code to intercepting code without even recompiling. So where is the advantage to Ruby? That Ruby has a standard library that handles logging in this manner? I was under the impression that increasing the size of the standard library was "crippling" in all common cases?
Today, since before we even started this debate, both languages would allow the same approach to development. If they both have the feature, why keep on arguing about who got it first or how long it took for either to get it? What's the point?
If we're going to talk about feature parity, where's Ruby -- and by extension, Rails -- with regard to sandboxing? Can you download code from an external source, execute it, and still be assured that, for example, that code cannot write to a particular directory on the server's filesystem? Can you limit that code's ability to open up network sockets to any host not on a whitelist? Can you transparently deploy an application to multiple servers in a cluster and have them act as one without ad hoc schemes involving rsync?
Java can.
I have no problem with your use of Ruby on Rails. If it works for you, keep on using it. Why do you feel the need to try to piss on others' parades? Just be warned that if you do so, others will be tempted to point out that no matter how new and shiny your hammer is, it's still a hammer like everyone else's.
I take exception to the notion that no one uses gcj, but I'll leave that for now.
With regard to a Windows DLL or Linux shared library, the answer is that it depends. Is that library thread-safe? If it is, then generating a mapping header file to methods in a Java class marked "native" is pretty straightforward in JNI. If the library is not thread-safe, you have more work ahead of you, but not just because of Java. The Apache web server is already written in C and yet non-thread-safe PHP support libraries -- also written in C -- prevented stable runs in production with a threaded MPM.
If you wrote the library to be reentrant, the JNI code is fairly straightforward. If it's written only with forking in mind, then yes, it will be far more of a pain. But that isn't Java's fault, that's the fact that you'd be trying to map one model on top of another and expecting it to be easy.
Does C# make it easier than Java by simply marking unsafe blocks, sure. Then again, I'd trust the JVM's security model a lot more than.NET, but that's a personal preference. After ActiveX, I'm a bit more wary of Microsoft technologies.
Is that so? It seems to me that you can compile Java to native code with gcj and integrate other languages like C++ easily with CNI.
As for other languages on the JVM (aka, the other direction), there's Tcl, LISP, Basic, Logo, Eiffel, Smalltalk, OCaml, COBOL, Ada, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and more.
Exactly how does it fail to successfully interact with other languages again?
If all you are worried about in C is stdio, stdlib, and math, then comparing that to the entire Java API is hardly fair. In that case, you could tell people to simply limit themselves to java.lang, java.io, and java.util. With just those three packages, Java is simpler to use and faster to learn.
Seemingly as a counterexample, you list off the dizzying array of GUI libraries available for C as proof of its superiority. I consider them to be a gross liability. Not only do you have to learn a GUI library, you have to learn a few to see which one would work the best. Also, picking a GUI library commonly locks you into a certain niche. While GTK+ is making inroads on Windows, it still lags in display performance and has poor integration with the host system if that system is not X Window-based. Qt on Windows or Mac? Definitely not my first choice.
So in expertise, you're right. A C "expert" does not need to know GUIs or databases to be considered an expert. Your assertion that a Java "expert" does need to know these things in all circumstances doesn't diminish Java, it simply means that you are holding the two against different metrics. There are quite a few Java coders out there that don't know AWT/Swing, and yet they are quite expert at server-side work (aka no GUI). I know Java game developers that can barely spell SQL let alone know the intricacies of JDBC or the java.sql and javax.sql packages. Some Java "experts" know the Java class file definition format by heart, while other "experts" do not and yet others limp along with tools like ASM.
You cannot really claim that Java is "drowning" while C's thousands of redundant and competing libraries for GUIs, databases, RPC, networking I/O, file I/O, cryptography, etc. -- with all of their wildly different and often times inconsistent APIs -- are somehow an improvement. That's simply deluded. Java has its faults, but "drowning" in libraries is not one of them.
Take some time coding for ODBC before talking about C's simplicity and utility again. C for most tasks is like using a hacksaw to put in a screw. No, there's nothing wrong with a hacksaw or with the screw. But don't try to ridicule someone for owning a screwdriver just because you can't cut metal easily with a screwdriver.
I love dynamic languages as much as the next guy, but there is one major item that I think make Java shine: explicit typing in the interfaces. No seriously, hear me out.
One of the great things about languages like Python is that you can shove just about anything anywhere provided the method signatures and properties match what's being executed. But what about when you didn't write the code? Plone (for example) has gotten much better, but when developing for it, it was often a PITA to find out what features were available from the return value of a given function or what features you should be putting into an object. Yes, I know, the documentation for that CMS has improved greatly in the last couple of years, but I got burned a few years back. And I blame the language.
With Java and interfaces, the objects and values passed to and fro are all documented by design. Javadoc, as often as people like to malign it, is so much better than nothing at all and worlds better than competing code documentation generators for languages like Python, Ruby, or Perl.
"Just look at the Python object definition," you say? The problem is that coders tend to mutate the object during runtime, adding *public* properties and methods on those objects. In addition, there are often methods and properties that are completely useless to the given job at hand. Are they needed in a given instance? You cannot know by looking at the object definition. You need a published interface for that, and that's what Java's interfaces do.
At less than five thousand lines of code, any language would work except maybe for Brainfuck, but that's a whole other can of worms. Once your codebase grows and, more importantly, gets more people involved in its development, documentation becomes all the more important. No, Javadoc isn't the "end all, be all" solution for project documentation by a long shot, but a hell of a lot better than nothing, and without explicit interface definitions, no automated documentation engine will help one bit with real problems.
Java can do this *without class extension* with what are called interceptors. These can be invoked either just before a method is called, just after, or both. You can log, perform timing measurements, or just about anything else. In addition, the class doesn't even have to be annotated with the logging data. Most environments will allow you to specify interceptors without changing your class files or a single line in source code. This means you can add logging without re-compiling or even unpacking your production code.
As for your precious Rails, two words: EJB 3.0. Entity beans don't need to extend from any other class -- although they can if you want them to. You can specify many-to-one, many-to-many, and other relationships with simple annotations. You can ensure that fields are not null and maximum length. Even beyond that, you can make your bean in Groovy, taking advantage of EJB 3's annotations while writing even more succinct code. All of this while still having access to the complete Java API.
If Ruby on Rails works for you, good for you. Keep using it. But it's got nothing that other frameworks on other languages don't have. Python and Django come to mind. Drupal on PHP as well (although I hate PHP with a passion).
You think that C hasn't fragmented? Borland C? Microsoft Visual Studio? Gnu GCC? You really think they are all completely compatible? Do you think that ANSI C, C99, and K&R C are all identical?
ActiveState Perl (for Windows) acts exactly like Perl for Unix? The packages from CPAN are all uniformly available to all implementations of Perl?
JavaScript is uniform between Flash's ActionScript, Microsoft's JScript, the ECMAScript specs, Mozilla's Seamonkey C-based engine, and Mozilla's Java-based Rhino engine?
Seriously? You believe that?
Compared to those others, Java is an absolute dream with regard to consistency. If you disagree, please point out a specific example. Most people who claim the contrary never seem to have actually written in the language and just vomit "wisdom" they learned from ZDNet.
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...for where I called you a racist. I applaud you for your well-rounded insight. I, however, did not call you a racist.
(I even stated the contrary explicitly in a reply to my previous post.)
You are speaking on the ethics of the scout. I am speaking on the ethics of those who run the Boy Scouts of America.
Very different things.
Believe me, I am well aware of the convenience of silence as an atheist. I have many firsthand experiences related to that "bigger picture."
I wasn't meaning to imply that you're a bad person. Nor was I trying to imply that you were sexist or a racist. I don't feel that you are responsible for every bad thing every white male has ever done for the history of the world.
I do think your knowledge of the world has been lacking though. Not your fault, just an artifact of the US education system. I think you would do well to look outside your clubhouse from time to time. What you see might disturb you if you have the courage not to flinch.
Without lookup them up in Google...
Have you heard the following names? Ida B. Wells? Frederick Douglas? A. Philip Randolph? W. E. B. DuBois? Emmett Till?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Black Student Union.
Have you heard the following names? Caesar Chavez? Gregorio Cortez? Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Latino Student Union.
Have you seen the movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" or "The Salt of the Earth?" Have you even heard of them?
The reason there is no White Student Union is because we all know who George Washington was. We all know who Napolean was. We all know Descartes, Lewis & Clark, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, and Davy Crockett. We learned of them and their significance in high school during US History and World History and Government and English etc.
If you did not know at least half the names I listed earlier in the post, you are getting an inkling of why a Black/Latino Student Union is useful. If you know more than half of the last group, you will be getting why a White Student Union is not.
Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anne Moody, etc. Know who they are? They are all examples of why a Woman's Student Union are needed.
Getting it now?
You are so firmly in a privileged position, you can't even visualize what it's like for others. You think your life is rough because you can't have a club like everyone else. THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS a White Student Union isn't necessary. A Student Union usually implies you are in an assailed position. If the only reason you want a White Student Union is so you and other white kids can hang out with each other and lick each other's wounded pride, that's a problem.
Go to the movie theater. Look at the movies listed. If the cast to a movie is more than 50% black, people usually consider it a "black movie." Ditto for latino. Ditto for east asian. However, take a movie like "Scream." Did you think that was a "white movie?" Of the movies out right now, how many have a non-white lead? One notable exception is the "Harold and Kumar" sequel: a movie all about being stereotyped based on ethnicity.
Hell, look here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/
Start counting the number of each group, men, women, black, white, latino, east asian, indian, etc. If you can't see a bias in our society for whites -- especially white males -- you are blind.
I am very happy that you are following the troop ideals that I and many others encountered. Unfortunately, I'm not sure you are the norm anymore. You certainly are not representative of the national organization.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/West/10/31/atheist.scout.ap/
As a white student, were you barred from joining the Black Student Union? Were you barred from joining the Latino Student Union because you weren't latino? Does the NEA bar certain segments of society from taking advantage?
You are confusing "everyone must participate" with "everyone may participate."
While the Black Student Union may not have had you in mind at their formation, I would fight to the end to ensure that you could participate. You do not have to participate, but you may.
See the difference?
And for the record, I was in the Boy Scouts many years ago. I know exactly what the organization is/was about, and I know the impact it can make in a young man's life. I have also watched several scoutmasters and camp counselors jump ship as it became more radicalized in the last ten years.
And the US Constitution originally counted black slaves as 3/5 of a man, women couldn't vote, etc. It doesn't make it correct or moral.
If the BSA wants to deny any federal grants and other federal funding (my atheist tax dollars), then go for it. As it stands, they're taking my tax money, I and my family therefore deserve just as big a piece of the pie.
As for abiding by its religious tenets, these didn't appear to me as a young man as requirements. I was completely honest at the time that I was an atheist. No one seemed to mind. Not my scoutmaster, not my troopmates, no one. I didn't hide the fact, and I didn't try to shove it down other peoples' throats.
Suddenly this "moral lapse" became a major issue. Suddenly these atheists in the organization were a threat. The atheists had been in the organization for decades -- probably since the beginning -- but now suddenly there's a problem. There had been no pattern of atheist scouts fighting and stealing and cheating any more than the typical scout, but somehow now they are unworthy.
"On my honor..." Start there. Any organization that teaches that it is morally righteous to single out those who believe differently from them has no moral directive to teach our youth.
You, sir, have no honor to suggest so.
I asked in another thread, but I ask this of you separately now. I also was in the Scouts. I am over 30. The change many of us refer to has been dramatic and predominantly in the last ten years.
If you really want to test the theory, go and ask directly if you can be a scoutmaster and be an atheist. I'd honestly be curious what the response would be, and if the organization has become more moderate of late.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. Every troop will be a little different, and they tend to be fairly autonomous, leading to abuses of power such as this.
However, the discussion was about the national organization and its policies. These organizational stances are the ones that I and others find so egregious.
It's the difference between some judge in a small town in the middle of nowhere suppressing free speech and the US Supreme Court suppressing free speech. Neither is good, but the latter is arguably a more serious matter as it sets the standard for millions, not just the inhabitants of a small town.
Would you accept the creation of an atheist organization that publicly excluded all Judeo-Christians? How about if it received tax dollars to do so? What if that organization allowed Christians, but only if they renounced God in front of their friends and family? Would you still just consider the whole affair as destroying that organization's rights?
What if their policy was no persons of Italian descent?
The simple fact of the matter is that atheism has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can pitch a tent in the rain, render first aid in an emergency, or be an effective leader. If the BSA's goal is in fact to foster theism, then they should call themselves a seminary school and be done with it.
As long as they get some of my tax dollars, they'd better damn well allow people like me to participate.
Last I checked, the US Army wasn't a private organization nor was it explicitly religious. Also, the armed forces are not always known for their fairness and decency: see Tailhook.
I don't know how old I would consider it, but I do truly hope that you are right, and that this is a sign of things to come (return).
I think you missed the part where atheists had no problems to speak of in the Boy Scouts until about ten years ago. I'm an atheist, and I was in the Boy Scouts. So were many of my friends, also atheists and in the Scouts.
Being an Eagle Scout affords you certain advantages in getting into federal military academies, looks good on a resume, etc. People cite their scouting days in college applications to beneficial effect all the time.
Then the Mormon Church buys them out. Suddenly the organization doesn't just have religious overtones, it kicks kids out that have done nothing wrong aside from having different beliefs. Kids that bully others are talked to, put on probation, or otherwise given a second chance. An atheist kid is told to either lie about something so fundamental to each of us (yeah, great morals there) or get kicked out.
Let's be clear. We're not talking about someone trying to make the other kids into atheists. We're not talking about kids calling press conferences to get the BSA to change the scout oath. We're talking about an organization that changed under our feet and suddenly became a hostile entity.
Imagine you were black, had taken part in an organization that had white supremacy overtones, but everyone laughed it off, treated it like an unfortunate legacy. Imagine all of your experiences and your friendships were a shining moment in your life. Imagine you had taken part in fundraisers and paid dues to this organization.
Now imagine that one day the organization calls you a nigger and forces you out. Imagine the effort and time and money given to this organization, the fruits of your labor, are now forbidden to you and everyone like you.
Now imagine that someone on a random internet message board proclaims that the organization has that right since they always proclaimed white supremacy, but since they've also always received federal funds, your tax dollars continue to help fund the organization that's turned its back on you and everyone else like you.
But I guess that's just belly-aching, isn't it?
You can't hide being black, but you can lie about being an atheist. For a 10 year-old, to stand up and be honest about your beliefs is true strength, no matter what that faith may be. It's far easier to just go with the flow and "blend in."
For the organization, however, the moral issues are the same. Forbidding access to some for who they are rather than what they do is clearly morally reprehensible.
Yes, they do. Just not private religious organizations that exclude people of different faiths, or lack religion, or are gay.
Except that BSA policy is to either have an atheist swear falsely to a belief in a deity or drop them for being honest.
"Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of character to refuse to swear falsely." Editorial, New York Times, 1993-DEC-12, commenting on the Boy Scouts' exclusion of a young Atheist.
There is a difference between proselytizing to convert other scouts to atheism and simply affirming that one is an atheist. Unfortunately the BSA sees no such distinction.
A Christian scout who steals, cheats, or fights will be given counseling, and an effort will be made to keep him in the fold provided he poses no imminent threat to others. An atheist scout who lives an exemplary life will be rejected unless he lies about his beliefs. How is this a moral example for young people?
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/West/10/31/atheist.scout.ap/
If you are over 30, your (and my) Boy Scouts is not the BSA of today.
If you are younger, I think you just got lucky. Extremely lucky.
I stand corrected. I guess the "developer hours" argument doesn't work either.
Then again, this argument has been far too acrimonious on both sides. Can't we all just get along?
Actually, interceptors are not specific to EJB 3.0, but nice try to divert attention from the main issue: Java has access to a feature that earlier was asserted it did not.
As for the number of hours the spec took to make, that is wholly irrelevant. The W3C CSS specs took far longer to make and many more hours than Netscape's layer approach in their 4.0 browser revision. That is a statement of effort, not of quality. If you want to assert that the quality of a particular interceptor implementation or the amount of time it takes to define an interceptor relative to Ruby, fine. But that wasn't the argument you just made.
As for a Ruby developer taking 10 minutes to produce the equivalent functionality, that may be true, but that does not mean it would take the Java developer much longer for the same task. That Ruby developer is taking advantage of many developer hours to make Ruby available, and Ruby also had the benefit of hindsight, being a younger language. If Ruby were older than Java and yet showed sufficient foresight to implement this feature, I'd be far more impressed.
Java, on the other hand, had to implement this feature in an accessible manner without breaking existing code. Now that this foundation has been laid -- not originally by Sun, by the way -- an admin or programmer can link primary code to intercepting code without even recompiling. So where is the advantage to Ruby? That Ruby has a standard library that handles logging in this manner? I was under the impression that increasing the size of the standard library was "crippling" in all common cases?
Today, since before we even started this debate, both languages would allow the same approach to development. If they both have the feature, why keep on arguing about who got it first or how long it took for either to get it? What's the point?
If we're going to talk about feature parity, where's Ruby -- and by extension, Rails -- with regard to sandboxing? Can you download code from an external source, execute it, and still be assured that, for example, that code cannot write to a particular directory on the server's filesystem? Can you limit that code's ability to open up network sockets to any host not on a whitelist? Can you transparently deploy an application to multiple servers in a cluster and have them act as one without ad hoc schemes involving rsync?
Java can.
I have no problem with your use of Ruby on Rails. If it works for you, keep on using it. Why do you feel the need to try to piss on others' parades? Just be warned that if you do so, others will be tempted to point out that no matter how new and shiny your hammer is, it's still a hammer like everyone else's.
I take exception to the notion that no one uses gcj, but I'll leave that for now.
.NET, but that's a personal preference. After ActiveX, I'm a bit more wary of Microsoft technologies.
With regard to a Windows DLL or Linux shared library, the answer is that it depends. Is that library thread-safe? If it is, then generating a mapping header file to methods in a Java class marked "native" is pretty straightforward in JNI. If the library is not thread-safe, you have more work ahead of you, but not just because of Java. The Apache web server is already written in C and yet non-thread-safe PHP support libraries -- also written in C -- prevented stable runs in production with a threaded MPM.
If you wrote the library to be reentrant, the JNI code is fairly straightforward. If it's written only with forking in mind, then yes, it will be far more of a pain. But that isn't Java's fault, that's the fact that you'd be trying to map one model on top of another and expecting it to be easy.
Does C# make it easier than Java by simply marking unsafe blocks, sure. Then again, I'd trust the JVM's security model a lot more than
Is that so? It seems to me that you can compile Java to native code with gcj and integrate other languages like C++ easily with CNI.
As for other languages on the JVM (aka, the other direction), there's Tcl, LISP, Basic, Logo, Eiffel, Smalltalk, OCaml, COBOL, Ada, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and more.
Exactly how does it fail to successfully interact with other languages again?
If all you are worried about in C is stdio, stdlib, and math, then comparing that to the entire Java API is hardly fair. In that case, you could tell people to simply limit themselves to java.lang, java.io, and java.util. With just those three packages, Java is simpler to use and faster to learn.
Seemingly as a counterexample, you list off the dizzying array of GUI libraries available for C as proof of its superiority. I consider them to be a gross liability. Not only do you have to learn a GUI library, you have to learn a few to see which one would work the best. Also, picking a GUI library commonly locks you into a certain niche. While GTK+ is making inroads on Windows, it still lags in display performance and has poor integration with the host system if that system is not X Window-based. Qt on Windows or Mac? Definitely not my first choice.
So in expertise, you're right. A C "expert" does not need to know GUIs or databases to be considered an expert. Your assertion that a Java "expert" does need to know these things in all circumstances doesn't diminish Java, it simply means that you are holding the two against different metrics. There are quite a few Java coders out there that don't know AWT/Swing, and yet they are quite expert at server-side work (aka no GUI). I know Java game developers that can barely spell SQL let alone know the intricacies of JDBC or the java.sql and javax.sql packages. Some Java "experts" know the Java class file definition format by heart, while other "experts" do not and yet others limp along with tools like ASM.
You cannot really claim that Java is "drowning" while C's thousands of redundant and competing libraries for GUIs, databases, RPC, networking I/O, file I/O, cryptography, etc. -- with all of their wildly different and often times inconsistent APIs -- are somehow an improvement. That's simply deluded. Java has its faults, but "drowning" in libraries is not one of them.
Take some time coding for ODBC before talking about C's simplicity and utility again. C for most tasks is like using a hacksaw to put in a screw. No, there's nothing wrong with a hacksaw or with the screw. But don't try to ridicule someone for owning a screwdriver just because you can't cut metal easily with a screwdriver.
I love dynamic languages as much as the next guy, but there is one major item that I think make Java shine: explicit typing in the interfaces. No seriously, hear me out.
One of the great things about languages like Python is that you can shove just about anything anywhere provided the method signatures and properties match what's being executed. But what about when you didn't write the code? Plone (for example) has gotten much better, but when developing for it, it was often a PITA to find out what features were available from the return value of a given function or what features you should be putting into an object. Yes, I know, the documentation for that CMS has improved greatly in the last couple of years, but I got burned a few years back. And I blame the language.
With Java and interfaces, the objects and values passed to and fro are all documented by design. Javadoc, as often as people like to malign it, is so much better than nothing at all and worlds better than competing code documentation generators for languages like Python, Ruby, or Perl.
"Just look at the Python object definition," you say? The problem is that coders tend to mutate the object during runtime, adding *public* properties and methods on those objects. In addition, there are often methods and properties that are completely useless to the given job at hand. Are they needed in a given instance? You cannot know by looking at the object definition. You need a published interface for that, and that's what Java's interfaces do.
At less than five thousand lines of code, any language would work except maybe for Brainfuck, but that's a whole other can of worms. Once your codebase grows and, more importantly, gets more people involved in its development, documentation becomes all the more important. No, Javadoc isn't the "end all, be all" solution for project documentation by a long shot, but a hell of a lot better than nothing, and without explicit interface definitions, no automated documentation engine will help one bit with real problems.
Java can do this *without class extension* with what are called interceptors. These can be invoked either just before a method is called, just after, or both. You can log, perform timing measurements, or just about anything else. In addition, the class doesn't even have to be annotated with the logging data. Most environments will allow you to specify interceptors without changing your class files or a single line in source code. This means you can add logging without re-compiling or even unpacking your production code.
As for your precious Rails, two words: EJB 3.0. Entity beans don't need to extend from any other class -- although they can if you want them to. You can specify many-to-one, many-to-many, and other relationships with simple annotations. You can ensure that fields are not null and maximum length. Even beyond that, you can make your bean in Groovy, taking advantage of EJB 3's annotations while writing even more succinct code. All of this while still having access to the complete Java API.
If Ruby on Rails works for you, good for you. Keep using it. But it's got nothing that other frameworks on other languages don't have. Python and Django come to mind. Drupal on PHP as well (although I hate PHP with a passion).
You think that C hasn't fragmented? Borland C? Microsoft Visual Studio? Gnu GCC? You really think they are all completely compatible? Do you think that ANSI C, C99, and K&R C are all identical?
ActiveState Perl (for Windows) acts exactly like Perl for Unix? The packages from CPAN are all uniformly available to all implementations of Perl?
JavaScript is uniform between Flash's ActionScript, Microsoft's JScript, the ECMAScript specs, Mozilla's Seamonkey C-based engine, and Mozilla's Java-based Rhino engine?
Seriously? You believe that?
Compared to those others, Java is an absolute dream with regard to consistency. If you disagree, please point out a specific example. Most people who claim the contrary never seem to have actually written in the language and just vomit "wisdom" they learned from ZDNet.
I've been able to "apt-get install sun-java5-jdk" for a couple of years now on Debian and Ubuntu. Don't blame Java, blame FreeBSD.
You're right. This is 2008. You shouldn't have to jump through hoops for bullshit distro reasons when the packaging was a solved problem.