Really though, it's not that surprising that life can withstand radiation, in hindsight. After all, plants and animals are out there every day, all day, without succumbing to the radiation bombarding them from the sun or from space.
I prefer developing an OO programming model abstraction and having that mapped to the database, rather than having the database introspected and then developing against the results.
This is the way most object persistence has been done for years. Yet Rails steps backwards about a decade and gets all the interest!
Haha, i mean, start ptocessing XML like this with Java and we will have a lot of browsers falling on their asses with exceptions:))))))
OK I am cruel!
Not really, because you can only successfully be cruel if you have a clue.
Developing AJAX sites with Java is trivial - for there are many implemenations of the standard JSF web framework that are automatically provide AJAX functionality with no extra work from the developer. ICEFaces is a good example. The idea that developers should have to hand-code AJAX is way out of date (unless you are someone who enjoys that sort of thing).
My main problem with the new series is that there are too many "Buffy-isms" thrown around. I didn't like Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I thought the writing was juvenille.
I couldn't disagree more. Joss Whedon is one of the best writers around, and the series was superbly and cleverly written.
I don't. I was not thinking about some continual battle, and with ships zipping back and forth to the home galaxy. The idea would be a growing colony, not a military mission.
And you call the Stargate Atlantis crew 'interesting'?
Enjoy the 'production value,' dood. Don't complain about the pallid content. You imply it doesn't matter.
How on Earth did you come up with that conclusion? I imply no such thing. I have had to put up with poor-quality science fiction productions on British TV for years. The content was great, with superb writers, but the production values - the sets and effects were terrible. Only in recent years have we managed to get good writing and good production together (as in the recent Dr Who series).
Earth 2 and Voyager called. They want their child back.
No - I was definitely not thinking of anything like those. Earth 2 had a very small scope. I was thinking of something much more spectacular: the idea would be to start the colonisation of a new galaxy....
And as for the apalling Voyager - no; the idea would not be a constant longing for home. This would be a mission for settlers, not a re-write of 'lost in space'.
For the franchise to continue to succeed, the producers and writers need to stop riding on the coat-tails of nostalgia and embark on a New Idea Trek, whose seven-year mission would be to explore strange new plot-lines, to investigate contemporary and new issues, to boldly go where few Trek writers have gone in the last decade.
Well, I was suggesting what I thought would be this kind of thing.
I am fascinated by the idea of what happens when distance and time re-assert themselves. We live in small world, where everyone can talk to everyone else, and travel is fast. In the Star Trek series, our quadrant of the galaxy is very much the same - it is almost 'cosy' - there is no sense of what it must be like to be really and permanently separated, rather like those setting out for new continents on our planet centuries ago, where messages could take months or even years to get back home.
I think Star Trek survived till today even with some bump and bruises along the way, but how about using a bit of creativity?
Well, yes. But the problem is that creativity happens rarely, and what you often get is warp drive/phases/the federation etc. simply re-packed with different names, so why not use the original? It is a known fictional universe, which means that much is 'given', and you have an established fan base. Also, I feel that there could be a lot of creativity based on Star Trek, especially now that special effects are cheap (and assuming good writers are used).
Just tack 50 years onto the end of the Voyager series, and go with that. Heck, go back to the Delta Quadrant with a new super-duper engine.
Why not make a series where a crew get to go out of the galaxy. In the Star Trek Universe our galaxy was seeded with life that would generally turn out humanoid. That saves on special effects, but now that is not a problem.
Here is my idea: Star Trek: Magellan - named for the great traveller. Set decades after Voyager; a colony fleet is sent to the Large Magellanic Cloud - a satellite galaxy of our own. Take a vast and fast carrier ship (The Magellan), running on autopilot for, say 50 years. The crew wake up, ready to explore and terraform and colonise. The crew is interesting. Holograms now have sentient rights, and there are borg members (like the Klingons in TNG, they are no longer enemies). Communication with our galaxy is slow and difficult. They meet real aliens, not just humanoids with different foreheads.....
I wouldn't say it's the fault of the developers, it's just many don't know how to write good SW. Yet even that isn't their fault because they never were taught how to write good SW since even teachers and professors mostly don't know.
Anyone who has worked in IT for more than a year or two should realise that retraining is important. You should not rely only on the things you learned many years ago. Poor software is the fault of the developers. To rely only on teachers is not good enough. Developers who aren't prepared to put at least a little of their own time into keeping up to date and retraining themselves should not be in this business.
Writing good SW is quite simple all you have to do is follow some good guidelines, the tricky part is what or where are these guidelines.
I have been writing software for 30 years, and I don't think writing good software is simple. Requirements keep changing. The approaches you have to use for a simple command-line program are often different from those for a GUI app, or a web app, or a real-time app. Sure, you can start with basic ideas of good structure and good documentation, but that is the barest essentials. There are testing and debugging skills that can take years to develop.
I'm a C person. I'll continue to use C for heavy lifting but you also need a good scripting language. I just wrote a Zend extension to interface with some of my C work and it exceeded all of my expectations.
If you're looking for the lastest hot new "technology" then Ruby is a good buzzword. Otherwise, if you're just looking to get work done, so you can go home and play with your kids, PHP is a workhorse.
No, it isn't.
Sorry, but this post sounds very blinkered. You are ignoring the 'elephant in the room'. The dominant thing that many people pretends does not exist.
The workhorse is now Java. It has unmatched support for databases, unparalleled library support. There are so many tools and frameworks for Java that anyone can find something suitable. There are rich and powerful open source and commercial IDEs. Java is now the major language for 'heavy lifting'.
Ruby is not the hot new technology. It is simply the hot new topic of conversation. There is a big difference. Ruby has neither the performance or the capabilities (such as internationalisation) for major use. It has virtually no significant presence in commercial development and has hardly impacted the dominance of PHP for open source web development.
It is sad to see how many people comment on major international forums who aren't prepared to look beyond their own personal experience, and get a real feel for what is actually happening in the industry.
Microsoft should go more simple, take smaller steps and adopt incremental approachs to new business.
I think one of the problems with Microsoft is that they often do adopt incremental approaches, but in the wrong areas. I remember in the 90s (and even in the late 80s) waiting for Microsoft to produce a robust multi-tasking desktop operating system. It was so concerned about absolute backward compatibility that they held back, and did things very slowly and took decades to do this. On the other hand, they take risky steps where they need not. They have abandoned a huge community of developers by making.NET incompatible with VB6, but there was not much point in having a VM-based system like.NET unless you were going to provide portability, which.NET is not. They can innovate all they like with.NET, but as anyone who has used MS products for some time can tell you, there is no guarantee that they won't drop.NET in a few years in response to some new marketing strategy.
So, you are right - they seem to have an unplanned, incoherent, scatter-gun approach. Up till now, the occasional idea has worked, and they have managed to quickly change direction when it hasn't (as with OS/2 and Windows).
I think you have written a very good summary, but I think you have missed something. The reason why this seems to be starting to fail is because the computing industry (at least the area where they are trying to make money) has stopped growing and changing as rapidly as it used to. These are not the early days of the PC or Windows when users are impressed by each new product. People are used to Windows, and no amount of publicity for Vista will change the fact that it is yet another version of the same old product. I would also imagine that Microsoft expected 5 or 6GHz processors around now to back up their new releases. Microsoft has previously had new markets to expand into, but now they are penned in. Their server sales market share has been stagnant for years, and a large number of Microsoft servers run... Java! Same with the mobile phone OS market. Attempts to use their desktop presence to expand into other markets have proved illegal. All around them, smaller companies are innovating. Microsoft have riden on the coat-tails of an exponentally growing hardware market with ever-increasing processor speeds. Now that those markets are slowing, Microsoft seems to be finding it hard to adapt.
Microsoft no longer has a coherent vision or a clear strategy. They waste their time trying to attack on several fronts, and in the meantime, their core is abandoned
I have been using Microsoft products since the 70s. Have they ever had a core or coherent IT strategy?
As far as I can tell, their strategy is purely business-based. It is to make popular products with as little effort on secondary issues (such as security) as possible. They have been focussing on security in recent years not because of any core belief, but because lack of it was starting to seriously threaten sales. All of their products have involved operating system tie-ins since the start. It is a perfectly reasonably sales model (except for when it is used illegally, as with the monopoly issue).
Microsoft has a clear strategy, but if you are looking for it in terms of IT you are looking in the wrong place.
I wouldn't hold it against PHP. Replication is the database server's job.
No it isn't, and if you assume it is you are going to end up with a slow system if you want to really deal with very high traffic. All serious modern high-end web development assumes that you should only drop down to the database when absolutely necessary, and cache data in the middle tier. Take a look at approaches like the very widely used Tangosol Coherence to see what I mean.
I'm a noob at this, but isn't the only factor in website speed the speed of the websites internet connection?
No, it isn't. From personal experience, many commercial websites require pretty complex queries for each customer, which may require significant calculations and searching of many thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of records (all within a single transaction). If this is the case, and you have many thousand active users, the database is the slowest factor. Really high-load websites often use complex data caching techniques, which work across clustered machines, in order to reduce to a minimum the need to drop down to the database. This is way beyond the capabilities of PHP.
you do realize that for most people, non-OO vs. OO largely boils down to replace(mystring, "foo", "bar") vs. mystring.replace("foo", "bar").
If that is the case, it is a depressing statement about the current quality of developers.
The advantages of OOP have been very well researched and understood for nearly 30 years. It is unquestionably a major advance in software development, with relevance to all areas, including websites, allowing re-use, encapsulation, isolation and testing of code (such as, for example, the use of mock objects).
To read about OOP being labelled as an 'extreme' in any context in 2006 is truly shocking.
(And also, there is is a big difference between a "scalable" website and a "reliable" website).
If Microsoft wanted to mess up Java again, they are powerful enough to do that whether the courts like it or not. Open Source or not Open Source, it makes no difference (as long as they retain the trademark and control of the standards of course).
This makes no sense. Sun retains the trademark, and control of the standards, which is precisely why Microsoft can't mess up Java.
Personally I think Java is already badly enough messed up that Microsoft no longer need to be afraid of it.
Microsoft are definitely afraid of Java. It is the dominant server-side development platform (which tends to contradict your statement that Java is in some way 'messed up'), a role which Microsoft has failed to dimish with.NET. Java is also gaining increasing presence client-side (after a very poor start). Even Microsoft now realises that for.NET to be a useful platform, it has to be able to work with Java server-side..NET is quite successful on Windows desktops, but Java rules the servers.
There are many open source programming languages already (perl, python, etc.), and they don't seem to have a problem with forking or compatibility.
They certainly do. Perl 6 will have incompatibilities with Perl 5. Future versions of Python and Ruby are certainly likely to not be backward compatible in many ways. There may be good reasons - not guaranteeing compatibility can allow a language to evolve faster, but to claim that there are no problems with compatibility is simply wrong.
I have a Java client on my webserver and half the mails I get are because the Java client doesn't work on people's computer. Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly).
What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.
Guess what! I have some Linux software that won't run on the 1.0.x kernel or with really early versions of libc. By the same reasoning this must surely mean that Linux is broken and you can't write the same code for different platforms.
Of course this is nonsense, and isn't what WORA is about, and certainly shouldn't have been rated 'insightful'. WORA does not include some kind of time machine facility to allow software written to current VM and language and library specifications to work on 10-year old VMs and old libraries. The idea is, of course, that if you write for Java 1.4.2, your software will run on any Java 1.4.2 VM (or later) on any platform.
Again with the speed comparisons to apache-httpd? Please compare features with apache-httpd, but speed with any of thttpd, lighttpd or and-httpd (or insert any number of actually efficient webservers here).
That is not the point. Features don't impact speed (Tomcat has a considerable, but different, feature set from apache). And, if we are getting to the point of detail mentioned here, it shows that Java really is in the same ball-park as C/C++ in terms of speed.
When do the C/C++ people finally admit that Java has good performance, or is there going to be continuous goalpost-moving?:)
I think it's fair to say that one of the problems with "higher than C" languages is that in many ways it's harder to do efficiently than C. Which explains why most of the slowest/hugest applications on my desktop are all Java ad python based
Such as? The largest and slowest applications I use are general office applications (such as MS Office or Open Office) - virtually all pure C++.
Until the day when you can say "hey, Duke Nukem Whenever is written in Java", that's all theory.
No, it isn't. People are using Java for high-performance stuff right now - it is not only games that needs this kind of performance. It is image processing, networking, file handling: for example, the Tomcat 5.5 pure Java application and web server can match Apache speeds for many cases. There is also a pure Java database (HSQL) which is very high performance.
And there is a commercial 3D game written in Java - Tribal Trouble.
If you can do run-time optimization for Java you can also do it for C++.
Sure, but why bother when you don't have the advantages of Java - portability at the binary level, garbage collection and easy multithreading?
The only thing that keeps anyone from writing a byte-code compiler for C++ that dynamically optimizes it for the processor is that, in the bottom line, the advantages are nothing to write home about.
Yes, they are. Theoretically (and this has been much researched), there are good reasons why run-time optimised byte code should exceed the performance of static compilation. This is going to take a bit more work from the VM writers though.
But, OTOH, if there's one thing you can *NOT* do in Java it's to state that "this variable is a pointer to that address, and the compiler should consider it when optimizing".
I am not sure what you mean here, but Java's references to objects can be implemented in any way the VM writers choose (providing they are thread-safe). They can be optimised appropriately.
I didn't say I wanted limited length strings. I said "suppose you can trust your strings are all limited in size". It's different in a very subtle but important way. I don't know what length "size" is, I just believe it's something my compiler can handle. Can you say in Java "char [] array = new char [{size | size
OK, so if you have char arrays of variant size, you can deal with each them individually and copy them using
System.arrayCopy
This will use a simple, tightly optimised loop to transfer data. This is going to no more or less efficient than the C solution, which involves pointer increments and a zero test.
Slashdot Mirror
Really though, it's not that surprising that life can withstand radiation, in hindsight. After all, plants and animals are out there every day, all day, without succumbing to the radiation bombarding them from the sun or from space.
It is nothing like the same kind of radiation.
I prefer developing an OO programming model abstraction and having that mapped to the database, rather than having the database introspected and then developing against the results.
This is the way most object persistence has been done for years. Yet Rails steps backwards about a decade and gets all the interest!
Haha, i mean, start ptocessing XML like this with Java and we will have a lot of browsers falling on their asses with exceptions :))))))
OK I am cruel!
Not really, because you can only successfully be cruel if you have a clue.
Developing AJAX sites with Java is trivial - for there are many implemenations of the standard JSF web framework that are automatically provide AJAX functionality with no extra work from the developer. ICEFaces is a good example. The idea that developers should have to hand-code AJAX is way out of date (unless you are someone who enjoys that sort of thing).
My main problem with the new series is that there are too many "Buffy-isms" thrown around. I didn't like Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I thought the writing was juvenille.
I couldn't disagree more. Joss Whedon is one of the best writers around, and the series was superbly and cleverly written.
I like Stargate Atlantis, too.
I don't. I was not thinking about some continual battle, and with ships zipping back and forth to the home galaxy. The idea would be a growing colony, not a military mission.
And you call the Stargate Atlantis crew 'interesting'?
Enjoy the 'production value,' dood. Don't complain about the pallid content. You imply it doesn't matter.
How on Earth did you come up with that conclusion? I imply no such thing. I have had to put up with poor-quality science fiction productions on British TV for years. The content was great, with superb writers, but the production values - the sets and effects were terrible. Only in recent years have we managed to get good writing and good production together (as in the recent Dr Who series).
Earth 2 and Voyager called. They want their child back.
No - I was definitely not thinking of anything like those. Earth 2 had a very small scope. I was thinking of something much more spectacular: the idea would be to start the colonisation of a new galaxy....
And as for the apalling Voyager - no; the idea would not be a constant longing for home. This would be a mission for settlers, not a re-write of 'lost in space'.
For the franchise to continue to succeed, the producers and writers need to stop riding on the coat-tails of nostalgia and embark on a New Idea Trek, whose seven-year mission would be to explore strange new plot-lines, to investigate contemporary and new issues, to boldly go where few Trek writers have gone in the last decade.
Well, I was suggesting what I thought would be this kind of thing.
I am fascinated by the idea of what happens when distance and time re-assert themselves. We live in small world, where everyone can talk to everyone else, and travel is fast. In the Star Trek series, our quadrant of the galaxy is very much the same - it is almost 'cosy' - there is no sense of what it must be like to be really and permanently separated, rather like those setting out for new continents on our planet centuries ago, where messages could take months or even years to get back home.
I realise I am arguing about this far too much, nut....
There we go again. Star Trek's notion of holograms is idiotic. Holograms are projections of light, there's nothing in there.
That is because Star Trek's notion of 'holograms' isn't projections of light.
Find the computer that controls the projectors.
That is what you are doing anyway. The 'hologram' is an interface.
As for the Maggelanic cloud, the stars are too young for life we can relate to.
Firsly, The Large Magellenic Cloud is up to 10 billion years old... so why would all the stars be young?
Secondly, we have no idea what is out there, and we have no idea of the range of forms that life can take.
But anyway, who cares? This is fiction. It is all fundamentally nonsense, based on ideas like FTL travel, and supposed to be fun.
Fanfic is where you want to be.
No, I don't. I want to see good production values.
I think Star Trek survived till today even with some bump and bruises along the way, but how about using a bit of creativity?
Well, yes. But the problem is that creativity happens rarely, and what you often get is warp drive/phases/the federation etc. simply re-packed with different names, so why not use the original? It is a known fictional universe, which means that much is 'given', and you have an established fan base. Also, I feel that there could be a lot of creativity based on Star Trek, especially now that special effects are cheap (and assuming good writers are used).
Just tack 50 years onto the end of the Voyager series, and go with that. Heck, go back to the Delta Quadrant with a new super-duper engine.
Why not make a series where a crew get to go out of the galaxy. In the Star Trek Universe our galaxy was seeded with life that would generally turn out humanoid. That saves on special effects, but now that is not a problem.
Here is my idea: Star Trek: Magellan - named for the great traveller. Set decades after Voyager; a colony fleet is sent to the Large Magellanic Cloud - a satellite galaxy of our own. Take a vast and fast carrier ship (The Magellan), running on autopilot for, say 50 years. The crew wake up, ready to explore and terraform and colonise. The crew is interesting. Holograms now have sentient rights, and there are borg members (like the Klingons in TNG, they are no longer enemies). Communication with our galaxy is slow and difficult. They meet real aliens, not just humanoids with different foreheads.....
I wouldn't say it's the fault of the developers, it's just many don't know how to write good SW. Yet even that isn't their fault because they never were taught how to write good SW since even teachers and professors mostly don't know.
Anyone who has worked in IT for more than a year or two should realise that retraining is important. You should not rely only on the things you learned many years ago. Poor software is the fault of the developers. To rely only on teachers is not good enough. Developers who aren't prepared to put at least a little of their own time into keeping up to date and retraining themselves should not be in this business.
Writing good SW is quite simple all you have to do is follow some good guidelines, the tricky part is what or where are these guidelines.
I have been writing software for 30 years, and I don't think writing good software is simple. Requirements keep changing. The approaches you have to use for a simple command-line program are often different from those for a GUI app, or a web app, or a real-time app. Sure, you can start with basic ideas of good structure and good documentation, but that is the barest essentials. There are testing and debugging skills that can take years to develop.
I'm a C person. I'll continue to use C for heavy lifting but you also need a good scripting language. I just wrote a Zend extension to interface with some of my C work and it exceeded all of my expectations.
If you're looking for the lastest hot new "technology" then Ruby is a good buzzword. Otherwise, if you're just looking to get work done, so you can go home and play with your kids, PHP is a workhorse.
No, it isn't.
Sorry, but this post sounds very blinkered. You are ignoring the 'elephant in the room'. The dominant thing that many people pretends does not exist.
The workhorse is now Java. It has unmatched support for databases, unparalleled library support. There are so many tools and frameworks for Java that anyone can find something suitable. There are rich and powerful open source and commercial IDEs. Java is now the major language for 'heavy lifting'.
Ruby is not the hot new technology. It is simply the hot new topic of conversation. There is a big difference. Ruby has neither the performance or the capabilities (such as internationalisation) for major use. It has virtually no significant presence in commercial development and has hardly impacted the dominance of PHP for open source web development.
It is sad to see how many people comment on major international forums who aren't prepared to look beyond their own personal experience, and get a real feel for what is actually happening in the industry.
Microsoft should go more simple, take smaller steps and adopt incremental approachs to new business.
.NET incompatible with VB6, but there was not much point in having a VM-based system like .NET unless you were going to provide portability, which .NET is not. They can innovate all they like with .NET, but as anyone who has used MS products for some time can tell you, there is no guarantee that they won't drop .NET in a few years in response to some new marketing strategy.
I think one of the problems with Microsoft is that they often do adopt incremental approaches, but in the wrong areas. I remember in the 90s (and even in the late 80s) waiting for Microsoft to produce a robust multi-tasking desktop operating system. It was so concerned about absolute backward compatibility that they held back, and did things very slowly and took decades to do this. On the other hand, they take risky steps where they need not. They have abandoned a huge community of developers by making
So, you are right - they seem to have an unplanned, incoherent, scatter-gun approach. Up till now, the occasional idea has worked, and they have managed to quickly change direction when it hasn't (as with OS/2 and Windows).
I think you have written a very good summary, but I think you have missed something. The reason why this seems to be starting to fail is because the computing industry (at least the area where they are trying to make money) has stopped growing and changing as rapidly as it used to. These are not the early days of the PC or Windows when users are impressed by each new product. People are used to Windows, and no amount of publicity for Vista will change the fact that it is yet another version of the same old product. I would also imagine that Microsoft expected 5 or 6GHz processors around now to back up their new releases. Microsoft has previously had new markets to expand into, but now they are penned in. Their server sales market share has been stagnant for years, and a large number of Microsoft servers run... Java! Same with the mobile phone OS market. Attempts to use their desktop presence to expand into other markets have proved illegal. All around them, smaller companies are innovating. Microsoft have riden on the coat-tails of an exponentally growing hardware market with ever-increasing processor speeds. Now that those markets are slowing, Microsoft seems to be finding it hard to adapt.
Microsoft no longer has a coherent vision or a clear strategy. They waste their time trying to attack on several fronts, and in the meantime, their core is abandoned
I have been using Microsoft products since the 70s. Have they ever had a core or coherent IT strategy?
As far as I can tell, their strategy is purely business-based. It is to make popular products with as little effort on secondary issues (such as security) as possible. They have been focussing on security in recent years not because of any core belief, but because lack of it was starting to seriously threaten sales. All of their products have involved operating system tie-ins since the start. It is a perfectly reasonably sales model (except for when it is used illegally, as with the monopoly issue).
Microsoft has a clear strategy, but if you are looking for it in terms of IT you are looking in the wrong place.
I wouldn't hold it against PHP. Replication is the database server's job.
No it isn't, and if you assume it is you are going to end up with a slow system if you want to really deal with very high traffic. All serious modern high-end web development assumes that you should only drop down to the database when absolutely necessary, and cache data in the middle tier. Take a look at approaches like the very widely used Tangosol Coherence to see what I mean.
You're wrong that this is beyond the capabilities of PHP.
No, I am not. Pure PHP does not have application-scope cacheing. You can't do this kind of stuff simply with session scope.
However it is beyond the capabilities of the average PHP "programmer".
Why should it be? This is trivial in other web development languages, such as Cold Fusion.
I'm a noob at this, but isn't the only factor in website speed the speed of the websites internet connection?
No, it isn't. From personal experience, many commercial websites require pretty complex queries for each customer, which may require significant calculations and searching of many thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of records (all within a single transaction). If this is the case, and you have many thousand active users, the database is the slowest factor. Really high-load websites often use complex data caching techniques, which work across clustered machines, in order to reduce to a minimum the need to drop down to the database. This is way beyond the capabilities of PHP.
you do realize that for most people, non-OO vs. OO largely boils down to replace(mystring, "foo", "bar") vs. mystring.replace("foo", "bar").
If that is the case, it is a depressing statement about the current quality of developers.
The advantages of OOP have been very well researched and understood for nearly 30 years. It is unquestionably a major advance in software development, with relevance to all areas, including websites, allowing re-use, encapsulation, isolation and testing of code (such as, for example, the use of mock objects).
To read about OOP being labelled as an 'extreme' in any context in 2006 is truly shocking.
(And also, there is is a big difference between a "scalable" website and a "reliable" website).
If Microsoft wanted to mess up Java again, they are powerful enough to do that whether the courts like it or not. Open Source or not Open Source, it makes no difference (as long as they retain the trademark and control of the standards of course).
.NET. Java is also gaining increasing presence client-side (after a very poor start). Even Microsoft now realises that for .NET to be a useful platform, it has to be able to work with Java server-side. .NET is quite successful on Windows desktops, but Java rules the servers.
This makes no sense. Sun retains the trademark, and control of the standards, which is precisely why Microsoft can't mess up Java.
Personally I think Java is already badly enough messed up that Microsoft no longer need to be afraid of it.
Microsoft are definitely afraid of Java. It is the dominant server-side development platform (which tends to contradict your statement that Java is in some way 'messed up'), a role which Microsoft has failed to dimish with
There are many open source programming languages already (perl, python,
etc.), and they don't seem to have a problem with forking or
compatibility.
They certainly do. Perl 6 will have incompatibilities with Perl 5. Future versions of Python and Ruby are certainly likely to not be backward compatible in many ways. There may be good reasons - not guaranteeing compatibility can allow a language to evolve faster, but to claim that there are no problems with compatibility is simply wrong.
I have a Java client on my webserver and half the mails I get are because the Java client doesn't work on people's computer. Usually this is because they have some old version of Microsoft's Java Runtime installed, which only supports Java 1.1 (badly).
What a mess! I can't really see how opening it up will make it any worse than it already is today.
Guess what! I have some Linux software that won't run on the 1.0.x kernel or with really early versions of libc. By the same reasoning this must surely mean that Linux is broken and you can't write the same code for different platforms.
Of course this is nonsense, and isn't what WORA is about, and certainly shouldn't have been rated 'insightful'. WORA does not include some kind of time machine facility to allow software written to current VM and language and library specifications to work on 10-year old VMs and old libraries. The idea is, of course, that if you write for Java 1.4.2, your software will run on any Java 1.4.2 VM (or later) on any platform.
Again with the speed comparisons to apache-httpd? Please compare features with apache-httpd, but speed with any of thttpd, lighttpd or and-httpd (or insert any number of actually efficient webservers here).
:)
That is not the point. Features don't impact speed (Tomcat has a considerable, but different, feature set from apache). And, if we are getting to the point of detail mentioned here, it shows that Java really is in the same ball-park as C/C++ in terms of speed.
When do the C/C++ people finally admit that Java has good performance, or is there going to be continuous goalpost-moving?
I think it's fair to say that one of the problems with "higher than C" languages is that in many ways it's harder to do efficiently than C. Which explains why most of the slowest/hugest applications on my desktop are all Java ad python based
Such as? The largest and slowest applications I use are general office applications (such as MS Office or Open Office) - virtually all pure C++.
Until the day when you can say "hey, Duke Nukem Whenever is written in Java", that's all theory.
No, it isn't. People are using Java for high-performance stuff right now - it is not only games that needs this kind of performance. It is image processing, networking, file handling: for example, the Tomcat 5.5 pure Java application and web server can match Apache speeds for many cases. There is also a pure Java database (HSQL) which is very high performance.
And there is a commercial 3D game written in Java - Tribal Trouble.
If you can do run-time optimization for Java you can also do it for C++.
Sure, but why bother when you don't have the advantages of Java - portability at the binary level, garbage collection and easy multithreading?
The only thing that keeps anyone from writing a byte-code compiler for C++ that dynamically optimizes it for the processor is that, in the bottom line, the advantages are nothing to write home about.
Yes, they are. Theoretically (and this has been much researched), there are good reasons why run-time optimised byte code should exceed the performance of static compilation. This is going to take a bit more work from the VM writers though.
But, OTOH, if there's one thing you can *NOT* do in Java it's to state that "this variable is a pointer to that address, and the compiler should consider it when optimizing".
I am not sure what you mean here, but Java's references to objects can be implemented in any way the VM writers choose (providing they are thread-safe). They can be optimised appropriately.
I didn't say I wanted limited length strings. I said "suppose you can trust your strings are all limited in size". It's different in a very subtle but important way. I don't know what length "size" is, I just believe it's something my compiler can handle. Can you say in Java "char [] array = new char [{size | size
OK, so if you have char arrays of variant size, you can deal with each them individually and copy them using
System.arrayCopy
This will use a simple, tightly optimised loop to transfer data. This is going to no more or less efficient than the C solution, which involves pointer increments and a zero test.