Hmm, I'll put hard money on the table that there aren't "millions" of Java games. How about you?
I would agree, but that was not what you were arguing, was it? You were implying that millions of downloads had no connection with the number of different applications. If you had actually researched the market, you would know that there are thousands of applications.
Hmm, from your comment you must not work on really large enterprise systems. JBoss is great for small-to-medium sized systems, but I'm betting there's a reason that WebLogic is at the top of the heap.
This is true, but almost ANY large application server for ANY language on ANY system will require licencing. It is not specific to Java, as you implied. If you want to write complex middleware (and not just PHP/JSP pages) you will need such a server.
Science is not a democracy. A theory's predictions check out or not...it does not matter at all what the majority of scientists think about it. When was the last time you heard about a 'consensus' around E=mc^2 or the like?
Not all theories have predictions that are easy to check. In that case, the only sensible thing to do is to ask the opinions of as many scientists in that subject as you can, and see what the majority think. There is no realistic alternative.
By the way, E=mc^2 is just an equation. It is still under debate, but there is a... consensus that it applies in nature.
Michael Crichton's latest book, State of Fear, is quite thought provoking on this stuff. As he says, "scientific consensus" is not science, it is marketing.
Why believe what he says? He has never published anything that is accurate science.
I have heard several 'experts' argue about whether it's nature or man causing the global warming. Doesn't anyone have a real answer yet?
Yes. There seems to be a scientific consensus that it is mostly (but not necessarily entirely) man made.
You will always get some scientists challenging this view - that is the way science works, but having individual experts arguing in the media about this gives a false impression of balance between alternative views. There is no balance - a majority of scientists agree that we are doing this.
Interesting that the last numbers I saw had C/C++ being the #1 language in demand for actual job postings. Java was #2, closely followed by C# and PHP
Depends where you look. What I see is Java and C/C++ about equal, C#/.Net far behind (about half the demand) and PHP hardly registering. This is in the UK, where.Net is relatively popular.
I also seem to recall that one application being distributed on 100+ million devices still only equals a single application, not 100+ million applications (must be that new math that I keep hearing about).
Ah, so those millions of Java games that were downloaded last year were all the same program.
BTW, I work in a number of languages (60+ last time I counted) to create enterprise apps and for what it's worth Java brings nothing to my table except additional overhead in terms of resources and licensing fees.
Licensing fees? What licensing fees? Use any free VM and an open source J2EE server like JBoss and there are no fees at all.
And our eyes have a crap design, the skeleton is entirely sub-optimal, critical organs often lack redundancy (heart, brain etc.) and the failure rate of parts of the body rises alarmingly after just a few decades (doubles every 8 years after the age of ten).
All of this, however, is a useful design for genes to survive as a long term optimal gene carrier is not necessarily best (at least after you've reproduced) if you want to experiment and improve your line.
No, it's not a useful design for genes to survive. Things are like this because it's hard for evolution to undo past designs. Once a design of the vertebrate eye had been established hundreds of millions of years ago, that is what natural selection was 'stuck with' from then on for vertebrates.
yeah, show me exclusive homosexuality in other animals i mean like humans do, not like confused dogs humping a tree.
Many animals show homosexual activity which includes full mating rituals and sex, not just 'tree humping'. This is know to occur in dolphins and wales, apes, rodents, deer, goats, sheep, and birds. In all, it been observed in hundreds of species. As for cases of exclusive homosexuality, this has also been seen in many species. For example, in japanese Macaque monkeys around 9% of all adults exclusively mate and pair-bond with the same sex.
I believe this is the reason why nothing like homosexaulity exists in other animals.
Nonsense! It's extremely common in large numbers of species. In one of our closest relatives the Bonobo chimp, same-sex coupling is an important part of their social behaviour.
Of course, if it were genetics, according to Darwin, it would be a trait that should have been wiped out long ago since homosexuals cant reproduce.
No. Natural Selection does NOT always result in every individual reproducing. There are many examples in nature of non-reproducing individuals in species. Those individuals help their brothers and sisters (or their parents) raise offspring in some way. Providing the individuals assist a significant part of their genome to be replicated, even by others, this is perfectly acceptable in terms of evolution.
Personally, I'm gay and I don't think homosexuality is genetic. I suspect that there are biological causes (e.g. hormone levels in the mother, etc.),
I'm also gay, and I strongly believe homosexuality IS genetic. Reproductive behaviour is likely to be profoundly influenced by genes.
There are plenty of reasons why homosexuality can be of benefit to reproduction. There are plenty of cases in nature where non-reproducing members of families assist in the upbringing and feeding of reproducing members, so helping their genes to reproduce (albeit indirectly).
Yes, if the kid's interested, they will learn it (teaching them can help avoid them learning bad habbits). But if they arn't inclined to be a geek, they arn't going to learn it just because you make stick them in front of a computer.
A very wise statement.
I remember the fashion in the UK for putting computers in schools in the late 70s and early 80s. Of course, no-one really thought what all these computers were actually for. They assumed there was some vague thing called 'computer literacy' that once picked up, would allow everyone to use any application. (This was before systems like the Mac made things simple). What actually happened was that a few nerds hogged the computer and played space games...
You've explained what disqualifies Perl, but with the exception of #3 (thriving job market), what disqualifies Python?
One reason I use Java is performance. Java used to be seriously slow, but now comes close to C++ speed in real applications. Python is a great language, but remains slow and interpreted. I know there are extensions for uses such as scientific computing, but those are external to python and written in C.
Yeah, because it's not like almost every single deep space probe has had RTGs, or like most long-voyage spacecraft use radiothermal heaters, or like JIMO is going to use a full blown nuclear reactor, or anything of the sort.
There is a huge difference between using radiothermal energy and a fission reactor, and even JIMO is only 1kW of power.
The costs of going to mars are expensive for many reasons; none of them are because nuclear power is banned in space. It isn't.
It wasn't just cost - the point being made was that we are a long way from doing the trip. I was wrong if I implied that nuclear power was actually banned in space, but there has certainly been resistance since the cancellation of NERVA in 1972. Remember the fuss in 1997 when Cassini was launched because of the reactor? JIMO is a welcome advance, but tiny compared with the reactor needed for a manned mission - attitudes will need to change before that happens.
We'd like to be able to, but so far, we are a long way off.
Actually, we aren't. Sending humans to Mars would be fast (and so reasonably safe) and not that expensive if we were simply to allow the use of nuclear power in space.
ant is a really simple cmd-line process, I can't see how it leaking memory would be a big deal.
It's certainly not simple! It is used for large-scale production builds and scripting. It's also used as a plug-in, often for repeated and automated tasks within other programs, where leaks would definitely show. (Actually, there have been *past* memory leaks in Ant, which caused problems in these situations).
However, if you sincerely think that Eclipse doesn't leak memory like a sieve, then I claim that you don't do your day-to-day in it.
I don't (I use NetBeans), but I know many who do, and without problems. Eclipse is a very, very widely used product. It's not used just for Java, but also for C++ and other languages. It is also the foundation for many custom applications, and is used for long periods. Eclipse is a well-respected and very well debugged application.
When there have been reports of memory leaks in Eclipse, these have been due to faulty plug-ins.
It is fair to say that Eclipse has a high start-up memory requirement, but I see no evidence or reports that it has any significant memory leaks.
Incorrect. Memory leaks in those systems are less of an issue because the processes are regularly restarted... Often to deal with memory leaks.
Not true. Java application servers can be very stable indeed. For example, the free Tomcat server can be run for a very long time without problems (memory issues arise if JSP pages are being constantly recompiled, but this is more likely in a development context, not a deployment).
Memory leaks (or rather, poor memory management) are common in badly written web applications, but very rare in the web/application servers themselves.
J2EE servers are used in situations that require very high availability, such as online transaction processing. Restarts are not acceptable in these situations.
Classes aren't the only thing that use memory in Java. Your VMs probably have max heap size set to 512M-1G in the first place...this doesn't include the VM's footprint. Even with 4G of memory, you'll soon be in continuous swap mode if you have too many VMs.
Those are max heap sizes. Few applications need anything like that, and very few set the size to that value. Before java 5.0, the default max heap was only 64MB. Now its the smaller of 1/4 of memory or 1GB. But, its only a command like switch to reduce it.
The focus wasn't code running on someone else's system and you know that.
No. You said you 'loathed' all java apps you had used. You did not qualify this. There was no 'focus' on what you said - it was a clear statement.
If the memory leaks on someone else's system, it isn't my problem, is it?
Yes, because if memory *really* leaked on those systems, they would become unstable and unusable. Java is used widely in critical applications like banking, and ticketing systems. If these systems become unstable, it affects you!
Java apps, running under Linux or Windows, are far worse than the average for all other apps.
I assume you have some statistics to back this up?
Sure, the java developers will make various excuses, but I loathe every Java app I have ever run.
Every one? I doubt that very much. If you have used commercial websites you are sure to have used a significant number of websites powered by Java application servers (check the number of.jsp extensions). You 'loathe' all those websites?
This is the norm, not the exception. It is not flamebait.
Generally, they are memory leaking pig apps.
Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, ant and all such widely used and successful applications are all memory leaking pigs? This would be surprise to the developers of these applications who have honed and tuned them over the years, and the thousands of contented users.
How about the thousands of Java games running on mobile devices in a few MB? Are they memory leaking pigs too?
Sure, there are memory leaking pig Java apps. There are memory leaking pig X apps where X is the language of your choice.
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Hmm, I'll put hard money on the table that there aren't "millions" of Java games. How about you?
I would agree, but that was not what you were arguing, was it? You were implying that millions of downloads had no connection with the number of different applications. If you had actually researched the market, you would know that there are thousands of applications.
Hmm, from your comment you must not work on really large enterprise systems. JBoss is great for small-to-medium sized systems, but I'm betting there's a reason that WebLogic is at the top of the heap.
This is true, but almost ANY large application server for ANY language on ANY system will require licencing. It is not specific to Java, as you implied. If you want to write complex middleware (and not just PHP/JSP pages) you will need such a server.
Science is not a democracy. A theory's predictions check out or not...it does not matter at all what the majority of scientists think about it. When was the last time you heard about a 'consensus' around E=mc^2 or the like?
... consensus that it applies in nature.
Not all theories have predictions that are easy to check. In that case, the only sensible thing to do is to ask the opinions of as many scientists in that subject as you can, and see what the majority think. There is no realistic alternative.
By the way, E=mc^2 is just an equation. It is still under debate, but there is a
Michael Crichton's latest book, State of Fear, is quite thought provoking on this stuff. As he says, "scientific consensus" is not science, it is marketing.
Why believe what he says? He has never published anything that is accurate science.
I have heard several 'experts' argue about whether it's nature or man causing the global warming. Doesn't anyone have a real answer yet?
Yes. There seems to be a scientific consensus that it is mostly (but not necessarily entirely) man made.
You will always get some scientists challenging this view - that is the way science works, but having individual experts arguing in the media about this gives a false impression of balance between alternative views. There is no balance - a majority of scientists agree that we are doing this.
Interesting that the last numbers I saw had C/C++ being the #1 language in demand for actual job postings. Java was #2, closely followed by C# and PHP
.Net is relatively popular.
Depends where you look. What I see is Java and C/C++ about equal, C#/.Net far behind (about half the demand) and PHP hardly registering. This is in the UK, where
I also seem to recall that one application being distributed on 100+ million devices still only equals a single application, not 100+ million applications (must be that new math that I keep hearing about).
Ah, so those millions of Java games that were downloaded last year were all the same program.
BTW, I work in a number of languages (60+ last time I counted) to create enterprise apps and for what it's worth Java brings nothing to my table except additional overhead in terms of resources and licensing fees.
Licensing fees? What licensing fees? Use any free VM and an open source J2EE server like JBoss and there are no fees at all.
Funnier still that Java is still an interpreted language
Not for a long time. Almost all Java implementations translate to optimised machine code at run time.
*ahem*
That'll be whales, then..
Er... yes
And our eyes have a crap design, the skeleton is entirely sub-optimal, critical organs often lack redundancy (heart, brain etc.) and the failure rate of parts of the body rises alarmingly after just a few decades (doubles every 8 years after the age of ten).
All of this, however, is a useful design for genes to survive as a long term optimal gene carrier is not necessarily best (at least after you've reproduced) if you want to experiment and improve your line.
No, it's not a useful design for genes to survive. Things are like this because it's hard for evolution to undo past designs. Once a design of the vertebrate eye had been established hundreds of millions of years ago, that is what natural selection was 'stuck with' from then on for vertebrates.
yeah, show me exclusive homosexuality in other animals i mean like humans do, not like confused dogs humping a tree.
Many animals show homosexual activity which includes full mating rituals and sex, not just 'tree humping'. This is know to occur in dolphins and wales, apes, rodents, deer, goats, sheep, and birds. In all, it been observed in hundreds of species. As for cases of exclusive homosexuality, this has also been seen in many species. For example, in japanese Macaque monkeys around 9% of all adults exclusively mate and pair-bond with the same sex.
I believe this is the reason why nothing like homosexaulity exists in other animals.
Nonsense! It's extremely common in large numbers of species. In one of our closest relatives the Bonobo chimp, same-sex coupling is an important part of their social behaviour.
Of course, if it were genetics, according to Darwin, it would be a trait that should have been wiped out long ago since homosexuals cant reproduce.
No. Natural Selection does NOT always result in every individual reproducing. There are many examples in nature of non-reproducing individuals in species. Those individuals help their brothers and sisters (or their parents) raise offspring in some way. Providing the individuals assist a significant part of their genome to be replicated, even by others, this is perfectly acceptable in terms of evolution.
Personally, I'm gay and I don't think homosexuality is genetic. I suspect that there are biological causes (e.g. hormone levels in the mother, etc.),
I'm also gay, and I strongly believe homosexuality IS genetic. Reproductive behaviour is likely to be profoundly influenced by genes.
There are plenty of reasons why homosexuality can be of benefit to reproduction. There are plenty of cases in nature where non-reproducing members of families assist in the upbringing and feeding of reproducing members, so helping their genes to reproduce (albeit indirectly).
Yes, if the kid's interested, they will learn it (teaching them can help avoid them learning bad habbits). But if they arn't inclined to be a geek, they arn't going to learn it just because you make stick them in front of a computer.
A very wise statement.
I remember the fashion in the UK for putting computers in schools in the late 70s and early 80s. Of course, no-one really thought what all these computers were actually for. They assumed there was some vague thing called 'computer literacy' that once picked up, would allow everyone to use any application. (This was before systems like the Mac made things simple). What actually happened was that a few nerds hogged the computer and played space games...
That was my whole point.
Ah. I understand what you are saying.
But then I probably shouldn't have replied to the original troll in the first place.
Well, doing that can be fun!
You've explained what disqualifies Perl, but with the exception of #3 (thriving job market), what disqualifies Python?
One reason I use Java is performance. Java used to be seriously slow, but now comes close to C++ speed in real applications. Python is a great language, but remains slow and interpreted. I know there are extensions for uses such as scientific computing, but those are external to python and written in C.
Yeah, because it's not like almost every single deep space probe has had RTGs, or like most long-voyage spacecraft use radiothermal heaters, or like JIMO is going to use a full blown nuclear reactor, or anything of the sort.
There is a huge difference between using radiothermal energy and a fission reactor, and even JIMO is only 1kW of power.
The costs of going to mars are expensive for many reasons; none of them are because nuclear power is banned in space. It isn't.
It wasn't just cost - the point being made was that we are a long way from doing the trip. I was wrong if I implied that nuclear power was actually banned in space, but there has certainly been resistance since the cancellation of NERVA in 1972. Remember the fuss in 1997 when Cassini was launched because of the reactor? JIMO is a welcome advance, but tiny compared with the reactor needed for a manned mission - attitudes will need to change before that happens.
We'd like to be able to, but so far, we are a long way off.
Actually, we aren't. Sending humans to Mars would be fast (and so reasonably safe) and not that expensive if we were simply to allow the use of nuclear power in space.
Because there's every indication that those other civilizations have more advanced value systems.
What other civilizations?
ant is a really simple cmd-line process, I can't see how it leaking memory would be a big deal.
It's certainly not simple! It is used for large-scale production builds and scripting. It's also used as a plug-in, often for repeated and automated tasks within other programs, where leaks would definitely show. (Actually, there have been *past* memory leaks in Ant, which caused problems in these situations).
However, if you sincerely think that Eclipse doesn't leak memory like a sieve, then I claim that you don't do your day-to-day in it.
I don't (I use NetBeans), but I know many who do, and without problems. Eclipse is a very, very widely used product. It's not used just for Java, but also for C++ and other languages. It is also the foundation for many custom applications, and is used for long periods. Eclipse is a well-respected and very well debugged application.
When there have been reports of memory leaks in Eclipse, these have been due to faulty plug-ins.
It is fair to say that Eclipse has a high start-up memory requirement, but I see no evidence or reports that it has any significant memory leaks.
Incorrect. Memory leaks in those systems are less of an issue because the processes are regularly restarted... Often to deal with memory leaks.
Not true. Java application servers can be very stable indeed. For example, the free Tomcat server can be run for a very long time without problems (memory issues arise if JSP pages are being constantly recompiled, but this is more likely in a development context, not a deployment).
Memory leaks (or rather, poor memory management) are common in badly written web applications, but very rare in the web/application servers themselves.
J2EE servers are used in situations that require very high availability, such as online transaction processing. Restarts are not acceptable in these situations.
Classes aren't the only thing that use memory in Java. Your VMs probably have max heap size set to 512M-1G in the first place...this doesn't include the VM's footprint. Even with 4G of memory, you'll soon be in continuous swap mode if you have too many VMs.
Those are max heap sizes. Few applications need anything like that, and very few set the size to that value. Before java 5.0, the default max heap was only 64MB. Now its the smaller of 1/4 of memory or 1GB. But, its only a command like switch to reduce it.
or a simple way to access compiled code from a script.
As in groovy, beanshell, jython, jcl...
Unite .NET + JAVA or Visual Basic ?
.Net and Mono.
Already been done! There is J#, and Java support in
The only bigger assholes than the guy who responded to your original post were the guys who modded him up.
If responding to vague generatisations with counter examples and facts counts me as an asshole, then I celebrate my assholeness!
The focus wasn't code running on someone else's system and you know that.
No. You said you 'loathed' all java apps you had used. You did not qualify this. There was no 'focus' on what you said - it was a clear statement.
If the memory leaks on someone else's system, it isn't my problem, is it?
Yes, because if memory *really* leaked on those systems, they would become unstable and unusable. Java is used widely in critical applications like banking, and ticketing systems. If these systems become unstable, it affects you!
Java apps, running under Linux or Windows, are far worse than the average for all other apps.
I assume you have some statistics to back this up?
Sure, the java developers will make various excuses, but I loathe every Java app I have ever run.
.jsp extensions). You 'loathe' all those websites?
Every one? I doubt that very much. If you have used commercial websites you are sure to have used a significant number of websites powered by Java application servers (check the number of
This is the norm, not the exception. It is not flamebait.
Generally, they are memory leaking pig apps.
Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, ant and all such widely used and successful applications are all memory leaking pigs? This would be surprise to the developers of these applications who have honed and tuned them over the years, and the thousands of contented users.
How about the thousands of Java games running on mobile devices in a few MB? Are they memory leaking pigs too?
Sure, there are memory leaking pig Java apps. There are memory leaking pig X apps where X is the language of your choice.