The entire project could have done in days what had been done in weeks using Java tools.
I disagree. With some areas of a simple web project this is probably the case, although using visual design of JSF pages with JavaStudio Creator allows the production of data-linked web pages in seconds. There are also many new Java approaches to web development and data access that are far faster and more elegant than the traditional struts/JDBC approach.
With the right tools and a good IDE, Java web development can be fast. Not as fast as getting the initial pages up with Rails scaffolding, sure (although projects like Trails come close), but still fast.
I don't understand why you said this, as they are already being used together, with JRuby on the JVM. Ruby has access to the features of the JVM (efficient threading) and Java class libraries and Java has access to the Ruby classes you produce.
I see no reason why Ruby would be slower as a language
True. Languages often do tend to speed up with time. But is if often hard to predict which languages do this. I used to use Smalltalk, and was constantly waiting for really fast cross-platform implementations. These never appeared.
I must disagree here. I can think of several commercial Java web-based projects that I know could have been done in at least the third the time in Ruby on Rails. And the programmer and author Paul Graham holds his startup's use of Lisp as the major factor in their resulting success. In my experience, the choice of language is far more significant than you make it out to be.
Again, I disagree. Even coding of the web application is a minor part of the project except for the very smallest projects. Most reasonable web projects involve careful storyboarding of the web pages, design and testing of database schemas and lots and lots of CSS work.
Not just me; take a look at the recent 'Quake 2 ported to Java' thread posted on Slashdot.
I've seen the Java version... with hardware gfx acceleration, it runs about as fast as it used to on a pentium. Sure, you can run Quake in Java, now that we have several gigahertz of CPU power and a gig of RAM and a gfx hardware acceleration.
Sorry, but I saw a demo version years ago on much less that that.
Woo fucking hoo.
Well, you could post this, or perhaps discuss bencharks.
nor does it make Java suitable for 3d games... unless you happen to be a disingenuous Java fanatic.
Which is odd, considering new 3D games written in Java are being released all the time. here is a new one:
How about the fact that Java apps are slow on a machine with 512Mb of RAM? How's that grab you, Java boy?
This is simply not a fact at all. I am using the Java NetBeans development evironment in 64MB. Works fine and fast. I am using Java games on my mobile phone.
How much RAM would recommend burning up on shitty apps that are still slow even when you do have gigs of RAM?
I guess that is why the newly-released PC game Tribal Trouble (written entirely in Java) runs on a 700MHz pc with 128MB memory.
Sorry, but the evidence suggests that whatever your personal experience, in general you are mistaken.
The ruby crowd positions themselves as none other than mortal enemies of Java and anyone stupid enough to still be using that pathetic excuse for a language!
Apart from the fact that 'that pathetic excuse for a language' is now the most popular, I agree.
Ruby is a stunning language, elegantly designed and full of fascinating features, and deserves to be promoted like this, not by comparison with other languages.
Are you claiming that this isn't the case? That we need the latest graphics cards and processors to run text-editors, personal organisors or IM programs?
Actually, I am.... These applications contain things like image handling, grammar checking, spell checking, file parsing and transfer, and many sophisticated GUI features.
If you can develop your product and push it out into production 3 times faster than your competitors, with little noticable performance loss, then you're going to make more money.
Having developed with a range of programming languages for 30 years, I just don't believe that this sort of speed different exists between languages. Unless you are using something really awful or verbose, then any competent developer truly familiar with any modern language and it's libraries will be productive. Ruby may well be at least 3x as consise as Java, but raw coding time does not make up that much of the development time of any significant project.
There's no high performance JVM either -- of course, that depends on your definition of "high performance". For me it's "doesn't slow my machine to a crawl and use all the RAM" -- so in my case, no, there's definitely no high performance JVM.
Considering there has been a new release of Quake written in Java that is very much the same speed as the C version I feel it is reasonable to disagree.
With insufficient memory, almost any application (especially GUI apps) will slow to a crawl.
It is like arguing that C++ is slow because KDE is unusable on a 64MB linux box.
But if your product comes out 6 months before your competitors, and is developed at three times the rate, who's going to have the advantage then?
I really don't believe it will. Ruby is a wonderful language I agree, but actual language coding is not a major part of any project. Design, testing and debugging are. In these areas, in my opinion, there is little difference between the language (in fact, Java has a wider range of high-quality IDEs and debugging tools).
why spend more time developing a program in Java, when you could develop it faster in Ruby?
Because not getting the best performance out of hardware, no matter how old or new it is, puts your application at a disadvantage compared to your competitors. No matter how much you may try and justify things, your users don't care about the language you use to develop - they care about performance.
There are alternatives - you can use both Ruby and Java together (JRuby works on the JVM). I think this 'mix and match' approach will be more widely used in the future.
Why? The speed of C and C++ are hardly needed for most applications
This is the same excuse I have heard for decades when fans of a language try and 'justify' it's lack of performance. Sooner or later a lack of performance really does become a problem - if it wasn't then many Ruby developers would not be working on high-performance VMs for the language.
There are situations where performance doesn't matter, but this is not true for 'most' applications.
I really like Ruby, but I will find much wider use for it when it is truly fast.
Re:Loving complexity for complexity's sake
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You just have to love java programmers making the easy more difficult. What I have learned in managing developers is that you have to constantly fight their desire to make things more complicated without a valid reason for doing so.
What a great generalisation! Not everything that looks easy is really easy. Not all code can be 'quick fixes'. Ruby on Rails may have its place, but Java and it's frameworks really shine when you need very high performance and a range of scalability options.
get real. It benchmarks close to C++ speed. For example, a version of Quake has just been released in Java that is as fast as the C version.
The reason for using languages on the JVM is that they can gain a substantial fraction of this speed. Open-source VMs for languages like Ruby are far from complete and fast (so far).
Rather than emitting Java bytecode from other languages, wouldn't the more useful effort be to improve generation of machine code from Java source and class libraries?
2. Byte code engines such as Java, Mono C# and Python average 7-12 times slower than the first tier...
Well of course Java is slow for very short benchmarks like this! They are totally unrealistic as a measure of typical Java application performance, as java was never intended to run like C: small command-lime apps. To get good performance from Java (and you certainly can) you need to give the Hotspot optimiser time to work. You simply aren't going to see this benefit in less than a few seconds.
To show this, I have run the Java benchmark with multiple copies of the input. The results are as follows:
It processes 100 copies at a rate 15x it seems to process 1! This is because the optimiser has kicked in, and because a significant fraction of that time for 1 copy involves start-up of the JVM and class loading.
Note that this 15x covers the supposed difference between Java and C++!
Java can provide very high performance for server-side systems where code can remain in memory and can therefore be highly optimised. The same is true of many other byte-code engines, such as the.NET CLR.
I'm pretty sure dynamic class loading has been around longer than Java, or even unchecked exceptions. So I say it would be sillier to be missing a way to dynamically load classes.
Dynamic class loading as an established central part of the language is - as far as I know - pretty much new with Java. The other thing that is central to Java is dynamic class loading with security and bytecode validation. It is about security.
It's been a while since I worked with Java, and I'm far from an expert. But when I was dinking around with it, I found it extremely annoying that I had to label every function that could possibly throw an exception. The compiler needed to be smart enough to detect whether a function might throw an exception, in order to tell me that I had forgotten to label it... So if the compiler can tell this without me telling it so explicitly, that pretty much relegates the label to syntax-enforced documentation.
Not really. The exception you wish to add to the signature of the method may not the same exception that the compiler detects is not handled. For example, it may be a superclass of it. This is why it has to be explicit.
Out of curiosity, how many "major" languages have checked exceptions? Java is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.
OCaml, although this depends on your definition of 'major'!
This guy, and many others, seem to agree that checked exceptions in general are kind of silly:
Plenty of others think they aren't. It is an interesting matter of strong debate at the moment.
Java, on the other hand, is inherently more Linux-friendly due to its intentional cross-platform nature, but at the same time it doesn't really seem to be inspiring the same kind of developer enthusiasm as Mono.
I'm not entirely sure how you measure enthusiasm, but:
As far as Ruby and Python. I would have to say that Python is probably the best successor of Java. Why not Ruby? Because, as you say Ruby is a raw young language it doesn't have nearly the libraries that Java and Python has.
I am a huge fan of Java, but I have recently started to take a look at Ruby, especially as it runs on the JVM (like Python). I have to disagree in some ways about Python's advantages. Ruby is not that young, and has (in my view) major advantages over Python, in consistency of language and flexibility. There are still significant issues with Python to do with scoping of variables that can make really sophisticated programming tricky.
Would using some other query language, that got translated to SQL, be any better? I don't see why it would.
The reason is portability - you can plug in translations for different databases, and a good translator will translate your query into highly optimised SQL for that database. This both protects your code from any future database migration, and allows the potential users of your code to have a choice of which database they deploy on.
The sea animal is 10 times larger, for heaven's sake! And if the transition took place over millions of years, why don't we have any fossils for the intervening time??
Because fossils are very rare, and size changes can happen very fast. An animal the size of a mouse could increase in size at a rate that was barely detectable in several human lifetimes and still get to the size of an elephant in a time too short for this change to be in the fossil record!
These aren't transitional animals! They're fully functional, fully articulate! You expect me to believe that (going back to the land/sea analogy) the transition was intantaneous thereby eliminating any difficulties that would normally arise during the transition? Talk about taking something on faith!
No - you are for some unknown reason assuming that there are transitional animals that would have problems. All of the intermediate animals would have been fully functional and healthy. Why should they have problems?
There just isn't enough time for these trillions upon trillions of random (mostly failing) mutations to occur!
That isn't the way evolution works. Failing mutations rarely even survive to birth. There is selection for good mutations.
"The difference is illustrated well in the article 'A Whale of a Tale'. This article shows that the critical skeletal elements necessary to establish the transition from non-swimming land mammal to whale are (conveniently) missing (see diagram)."
Where is this from?
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe this crap! I'm going to leave it here.
Please don't - I am enjoying this. You did say you were going to look at things with an open mind. Calling it all crap without being prepared to debate is not doing that.
Merry Christmas to you too! (You don't have to be un-Christian to accept evolution).
Here's a refutation from the Answers In Genesis group
The article is full of so many errors it is hard to know where to start.
People who (like in that article) post statements like "Therefore, natural selection would not have favored incomplete intermediate forms." Really aren't putting forward a sensible argument.
You can't say that intermediate forms can't have a function and then say:
"we should not assume that ignorance of a function means there is no function"
One thing the article points out is that the diagram showing the transition from a land mammal to the first sea-based one fails to show an important point: the two species are RADICALLY different in size.
That isn't a problem at all. Evolution of size changes is extremely simple. Remember we are talking of changes over millions of years.
I'll let you read the article, but I will say that in regard to the aforementioned transition, I think it's a bit of a stretch to go from what appears to be a fully functional land animal to a fully functional sea animal! I don't buy it! Why don't these transitional animals die off due to poor ambulatory ability, poor digestion ability, etc., which would be the result if the one were really changing into the other; evolutionists can't answer that one!
We can easily answer it, as there are plenty of animals around right now that are transitional - think of hippos, seals, penguins, crocodiles. They seem to be coping OK!
The "troll" ranking is another example, and it's sad because it's censorship, plain and simple.
I agree.
As to the point-by-point refutation, you can skip all that if you want and just direct me to a website that shows the intermediate fossil record for the transition between a primitive animal and the modern animal it was supposed to have evolved to, say, ape and man.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby's conciseness is a by-product of its power.
In some respects, I agree.
The entire project could have done in days what had been done in weeks using Java tools.
I disagree. With some areas of a simple web project this is probably the case, although using visual design of JSF pages with JavaStudio Creator allows the production of data-linked web pages in seconds. There are also many new Java approaches to web development and data access that are far faster and more elegant than the traditional struts/JDBC approach.
With the right tools and a good IDE, Java web development can be fast. Not as fast as getting the initial pages up with Rails scaffolding, sure (although projects like Trails come close), but still fast.
Also, Ruby + Java doesn't lead to a nice combo.
I don't understand why you said this, as they are already being used together, with JRuby on the JVM. Ruby has access to the features of the JVM (efficient threading) and Java class libraries and Java has access to the Ruby classes you produce.
I see no reason why Ruby would be slower as a language
True. Languages often do tend to speed up with time. But is if often hard to predict which languages do this. I used to use Smalltalk, and was constantly waiting for really fast cross-platform implementations. These never appeared.
I must disagree here. I can think of several commercial Java web-based projects that I know could have been done in at least the third the time in Ruby on Rails. And the programmer and author Paul Graham holds his startup's use of Lisp as the major factor in their resulting success. In my experience, the choice of language is far more significant than you make it out to be.
Again, I disagree. Even coding of the web application is a minor part of the project except for the very smallest projects. Most reasonable web projects involve careful storyboarding of the web pages, design and testing of database schemas and lots and lots of CSS work.
Oh, and BTW: you are lying about Quake.
Not just me; take a look at the recent 'Quake 2 ported to Java' thread posted on Slashdot.
I've seen the Java version... with hardware gfx acceleration, it runs about as fast as it used to on a pentium. Sure, you can run Quake in Java, now that we have several gigahertz of CPU power and a gig of RAM and a gfx hardware acceleration.
Sorry, but I saw a demo version years ago on much less that that.
Woo fucking hoo.
Well, you could post this, or perhaps discuss bencharks.
nor does it make Java suitable for 3d games... unless you happen to be a disingenuous Java fanatic.
Which is odd, considering new 3D games written in Java are being released all the time. here is a new one:
http://tribaltrouble.com/
How about the fact that Java apps are slow on a machine with 512Mb of RAM? How's that grab you, Java boy?
This is simply not a fact at all. I am using the Java NetBeans development evironment in 64MB. Works fine and fast. I am using Java games on my mobile phone.
How much RAM would recommend burning up on shitty apps that are still slow even when you do have gigs of RAM?
I guess that is why the newly-released PC game Tribal Trouble (written entirely in Java) runs on a 700MHz pc with 128MB memory.
Sorry, but the evidence suggests that whatever your personal experience, in general you are mistaken.
The ruby crowd positions themselves as none other than mortal enemies of Java and anyone stupid enough to still be using that pathetic excuse for a language!
Apart from the fact that 'that pathetic excuse for a language' is now the most popular, I agree.
Ruby is a stunning language, elegantly designed and full of fascinating features, and deserves to be promoted like this, not by comparison with other languages.
Are you claiming that this isn't the case? That we need the latest graphics cards and processors to run text-editors, personal organisors or IM programs?
Actually, I am.... These applications contain things like image handling, grammar checking, spell checking, file parsing and transfer, and many sophisticated GUI features.
If you can develop your product and push it out into production 3 times faster than your competitors, with little noticable performance loss, then you're going to make more money.
Having developed with a range of programming languages for 30 years, I just don't believe that this sort of speed different exists between languages. Unless you are using something really awful or verbose, then any competent developer truly familiar with any modern language and it's libraries will be productive. Ruby may well be at least 3x as consise as Java, but raw coding time does not make up that much of the development time of any significant project.
There's no high performance JVM either -- of course, that depends on your definition of "high performance". For me it's "doesn't slow my machine to a crawl and use all the RAM" -- so in my case, no, there's definitely no high performance JVM.
Considering there has been a new release of Quake written in Java that is very much the same speed as the C version I feel it is reasonable to disagree.
With insufficient memory, almost any application (especially GUI apps) will slow to a crawl.
It is like arguing that C++ is slow because KDE is unusable on a 64MB linux box.
But if your product comes out 6 months before your competitors, and is developed at three times the rate, who's going to have the advantage then?
I really don't believe it will. Ruby is a wonderful language I agree, but actual language coding is not a major part of any project. Design, testing and debugging are. In these areas, in my opinion, there is little difference between the language (in fact, Java has a wider range of high-quality IDEs and debugging tools).
why spend more time developing a program in Java, when you could develop it faster in Ruby?
Because not getting the best performance out of hardware, no matter how old or new it is, puts your application at a disadvantage compared to your competitors. No matter how much you may try and justify things, your users don't care about the language you use to develop - they care about performance.
There are alternatives - you can use both Ruby and Java together (JRuby works on the JVM). I think this 'mix and match' approach will be more widely used in the future.
Why? The speed of C and C++ are hardly needed for most applications
This is the same excuse I have heard for decades when fans of a language try and 'justify' it's lack of performance. Sooner or later a lack of performance really does become a problem - if it wasn't then many Ruby developers would not be working on high-performance VMs for the language.
There are situations where performance doesn't matter, but this is not true for 'most' applications.
I really like Ruby, but I will find much wider use for it when it is truly fast.
You just have to love java programmers making the easy more difficult. What I have learned in managing developers is that you have to constantly fight their desire to make things more complicated without a valid reason for doing so.
What a great generalisation! Not everything that looks easy is really easy. Not all code can be 'quick fixes'. Ruby on Rails may have its place, but Java and it's frameworks really shine when you need very high performance and a range of scalability options.
Yes on both counts
No on both counts. There is as yet no high-performance VM for Ruby, and it's memory use is not optimised.
Having said that, Ruby is a wonderful language.
If the world was engaged in such a massive flood it could have also resulted in large tecnonic shifts creating mountains and causing volcanos to form.
No. Tectonic shifts are due to sideways forces over long periods of time. Floods create downward forces.
Um, because the JVM is fucking slow
get real. It benchmarks close to C++ speed. For example, a version of Quake has just been released in Java that is as fast as the C version.
The reason for using languages on the JVM is that they can gain a substantial fraction of this speed. Open-source VMs for languages like Ruby are far from complete and fast (so far).
Rather than emitting Java bytecode from other languages, wouldn't the more useful effort be to improve generation of machine code from Java source and class libraries?
Why bother when the JVM emits highly optimised native code for whatever platform you deploy on?
2. Byte code engines such as Java, Mono C# and Python average 7-12 times slower than the first tier...
.NET CLR.
Well of course Java is slow for very short benchmarks like this! They are totally unrealistic as a measure of typical Java application performance, as java was never intended to run like C: small command-lime apps. To get good performance from Java (and you certainly can) you need to give the Hotspot optimiser time to work. You simply aren't going to see this benefit in less than a few seconds.
To show this, I have run the Java benchmark with multiple copies of the input. The results are as follows:
1 copy: 1.449s
5 copies: 1.561s
25 copies: 2.175s
100 copies: 4.480s
It processes 100 copies at a rate 15x it seems to process 1! This is because the optimiser has kicked in, and because a significant fraction of that time for 1 copy involves start-up of the JVM and class loading.
Note that this 15x covers the supposed difference between Java and C++!
Java can provide very high performance for server-side systems where code can remain in memory and can therefore be highly optimised. The same is true of many other byte-code engines, such as the
I'm pretty sure dynamic class loading has been around longer than Java, or even unchecked exceptions. So I say it would be sillier to be missing a way to dynamically load classes.
Dynamic class loading as an established central part of the language is - as far as I know - pretty much new with Java. The other thing that is central to Java is dynamic class loading with security and bytecode validation. It is about security.
It's been a while since I worked with Java, and I'm far from an expert. But when I was dinking around with it, I found it extremely annoying that I had to label every function that could possibly throw an exception. The compiler needed to be smart enough to detect whether a function might throw an exception, in order to tell me that I had forgotten to label it... So if the compiler can tell this without me telling it so explicitly, that pretty much relegates the label to syntax-enforced documentation.
Not really. The exception you wish to add to the signature of the method may not the same exception that the compiler detects is not handled. For example, it may be a superclass of it. This is why it has to be explicit.
Out of curiosity, how many "major" languages have checked exceptions? Java is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.
OCaml, although this depends on your definition of 'major'!
This guy, and many others, seem to agree that checked exceptions in general are kind of silly:
Plenty of others think they aren't. It is an interesting matter of strong debate at the moment.
Java, on the other hand, is inherently more Linux-friendly due to its intentional cross-platform nature, but at the same time it doesn't really seem to be inspiring the same kind of developer enthusiasm as Mono.
o ry_was_made_today
I'm not entirely sure how you measure enthusiasm, but:
http://www.jroller.com/page/matsh?entry=java_hist
"Today Java overtook C++ as the language with most projects on SourceForge".
and
www.dice.com (jobs)
Java: 13,000
C#: 3900
mono: 9
Does a few people being very enthusiastic outweigh thousands being slighly enthusiastic?
or is this sort of statement just wishful thinking?
As far as Ruby and Python. I would have to say that Python is probably the best successor of Java. Why not Ruby? Because, as you say Ruby is a raw young language it doesn't have nearly the libraries that Java and Python has.
I am a huge fan of Java, but I have recently started to take a look at Ruby, especially as it runs on the JVM (like Python). I have to disagree in some ways about Python's advantages. Ruby is not that young, and has (in my view) major advantages over Python, in consistency of language and flexibility. There are still significant issues with Python to do with scoping of variables that can make really sophisticated programming tricky.
Would using some other query language, that got translated to SQL, be any better? I don't see why it would.
The reason is portability - you can plug in translations for different databases, and a good translator will translate your query into highly optimised SQL for that database. This both protects your code from any future database migration, and allows the potential users of your code to have a choice of which database they deploy on.
Too quick and easy. I don't have time to write classes, compile jars, etc.
Then JSP (Java Server Pages) should suit you fine.
The sea animal is 10 times larger, for heaven's sake! And if the transition took place over millions of years, why don't we have any fossils for the intervening time??
Because fossils are very rare, and size changes can happen very fast. An animal the size of a mouse could increase in size at a rate that was barely detectable in several human lifetimes and still get to the size of an elephant in a time too short for this change to be in the fossil record!
These aren't transitional animals! They're fully functional, fully articulate! You expect me to believe that (going back to the land/sea analogy) the transition was intantaneous thereby eliminating any difficulties that would normally arise during the transition? Talk about taking something on faith!
No - you are for some unknown reason assuming that there are transitional animals that would have problems. All of the intermediate animals would have been fully functional and healthy. Why should they have problems?
There just isn't enough time for these trillions upon trillions of random (mostly failing) mutations to occur!
That isn't the way evolution works. Failing mutations rarely even survive to birth. There is selection for good mutations.
"The difference is illustrated well in the article 'A Whale of a Tale'. This article shows that the critical skeletal elements necessary to establish the transition from non-swimming land mammal to whale are (conveniently) missing (see diagram)."
Where is this from?
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe this crap! I'm going to leave it here.
Please don't - I am enjoying this. You did say you were going to look at things with an open mind. Calling it all crap without being prepared to debate is not doing that.
Merry Christmas to you too! (You don't have to be un-Christian to accept evolution).
Here's a refutation from the Answers In Genesis group
The article is full of so many errors it is hard to know where to start.
People who (like in that article) post statements like "Therefore, natural selection would not have favored incomplete intermediate forms." Really aren't putting forward a sensible argument.
You can't say that intermediate forms can't have a function and then say:
"we should not assume that ignorance of a function means there is no function"
One thing the article points out is that the diagram showing the transition from a land mammal to the first sea-based one fails to show an important point: the two species are RADICALLY different in size.
That isn't a problem at all. Evolution of size changes is extremely simple. Remember we are talking of changes over millions of years.
I'll let you read the article, but I will say that in regard to the aforementioned transition, I think it's a bit of a stretch to go from what appears to be a fully functional land animal to a fully functional sea animal! I don't buy it! Why don't these transitional animals die off due to poor ambulatory ability, poor digestion ability, etc., which would be the result if the one were really changing into the other; evolutionists can't answer that one!
We can easily answer it, as there are plenty of animals around right now that are transitional - think of hippos, seals, penguins, crocodiles. They seem to be coping OK!
The "troll" ranking is another example, and it's sad because it's censorship, plain and simple.
I agree.
As to the point-by-point refutation, you can skip all that if you want and just direct me to a website that shows the intermediate fossil record for the transition between a primitive animal and the modern animal it was supposed to have evolved to, say, ape and man.
My favourite example is the whale:
http://www.origins.tv/darwin/landtosea.htm
All fossils are shown (click on the pictures for the fossils) and the step-by-step evolution is clear.
Does this help? I can provide other examples if you are interested.