The features of D doesn't seem like anything that isn't solved (but perhaps in an ugly way) by C++11 and Boost.
Except D has compile-time evaluation of a significant subset of the language as its alternative to the C++ preprocessor. That, among other things, means large D projects compile orders of magnitude faster than equivalent size C or C++ projects. Fast compile times were one of the killer features touted when Google launched their 'Go' language, but D compiles as quickly or more quickly and is a lot closer to "C++11 with simpler syntax" than Go.
But if you're going to switch tools, why not go for broke and switch to a pure functional language that will completely alter the way you have to design your software, perhaps in the ML family?
Fair point. I can't argue with that.
I'm aware of the studies. I've read and applied Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert, just about half the books by Ellington Darden, the Nautilus Bulletins by Arthur Jones, Heavy Duty 2 by Mike Mentzer, every article at Cyberpump (back when all of the site content was free), Power Factor Training by John Little and Pete Sisco, articles by Doug McGuff and Drew Baye, and even the Power of 10 by Adam Zickerman and Super Slow: The Ultimate Exercise Protocol by Ken Hutchins. I've also read the fitness research paper published in the June 2004 edition of the Journal of Exercise Physiology online. I've worked out as often as every other day to as infrequently as once every three weeks. I've done routines with full body single set circuits at each workout. I've also done routines with different muscle group splits. I've trained to concentric failure, to static failure, and even occasionally to eccentric failure. All that from 1996 to 2014 and in all cases the gains stopped after the first few weeks and plateaued for months until I quit and started over.
The only thing great about HIT is that it's easier on the joints. When I do higher volume work I tend to develop joint pain, and of course in the long run it's better to have barely-better-than-untrained muscles and healthy joints than strong muscles and damaged joints.
Strength training studies are problematic. A trainee can hold back at the initial strength test, thus giving false gains at the end of the study. The trainees can do additional workouts outside of the supervision of the study supervisors. Study participants can be using steroids. Perhaps worst of all, regaining muscle mass you formerly possessed tends to be much faster than gaining new muscle mass. ( There are several studies that document this. One such link: http://www.thinkmuscle.com/art... ) Most workout studies don't control for the influence of this factor on outcomes or try to control for it but only rely upon word-of-mouth of the study participants, which is unreliable. So if you conduct a strength study and your random assignment of subjects puts five people that each used to have twenty more pounds of muscle mass in one group, they're going to make much greater gains in a shorter time than other subjects in the same group, and skew your results. If you're familiar with Arthur Jones' "Colorado Experiment", the two research subjects had both gained and then lost over thirty pounds of muscle in the years before the experiment. So the fact that they made massive gains on HIT doesn't mean anything for trainees that had never previously had thirty additional pounds of muscle.
I've heard that explanation before, but it always strikes me as a retcon made by people associated with the film once software professionals started lampooning it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
It's a difficult genre, right? It would be very difficult to make a real film about hacking interesting or understandable to the average person. So you've got the difficult task of making it dramatic and understandable without turning it into cyber-fantasy.
For the physical fitness - but nothing else - you can assume the guy got into great physical condition after going to prison. According to my cousin the prison guard, a lot of prisoners get into great shape - they have nothing to do all day, so exercising around the clock is just a way to pass the time.
In my experience, an hour three times a week will carry you for a month or two and then all progress will stop no matter how hard you push during those three hours. To go further, you need a higher volume of work - or maybe anabolic steroids.
The reason people in boot camp, people in prison, and personal trainers get into great shape isn't an hour of hard work here or there and days of rest. Instead they have work, rest, work, rest, work rest throughout the day for days at a time. The soldiers work that way because they have instructors breathing down their necks, the prisoners work that way because they're totally bored and doing another sets of pushups, pullups, and burpees is just a way to pass the time, and the trainers work that way because they keep demonstrating exercises and moving weights in position and leading exercise classes and working out to kill time between clients.
Trying to tell John Q Public he can look like Chris Hemsworth on three hours of work a week is a marketing gimmick for people trying to sell exercise DVDs, fitness magazines, and gym memberships. If they said, "You can look like this with just three moderate workouts per day, six days per week!" they couldn't pay rent.
You don't need a Core i7 running at 3.6 GHz to run Minecraft, and that's the CPU and CPU speed the author was complaining about. If he needs that kind of performance, he's working his laptop five or ten times harder (of course I'm making that number up, I can't make an educated guess at the exact value) than you work yours. Minecraft works fine on a PC I have from early 2006, a core i7 can probably run it at idle.
But I think the great majority of people are fine with a laptop. I work on a medium size Java application and my laptop runs an IDE, a few browsers with many tabs, Maven, git, virtualization software, etc... all without hiccups, and I only have an Intel core i5. What percentage of PC users outside people running high end games need more computing power than that? (Oh, and if anyone wants to bash Java, be my guest - I don't love it either, but it pays the bills.)
I like the look a lot. But my first friend to get a device with Lollipop - a Nexus 6 - had a crash-happy experience. I haven't had any crashes on Android 4.4.2 since I got my current device nine months ago, why would I give that up for something that obviously got pushed to customers before it was ready?
Well, if you're going to blow the source material to hell than I guess throwing in some Harkkonens would be fun too. Maybe add Darth Vader while you're at it, and General Zod.
Good point - you are correct and I don't dispute what you write.
However, my interpretation of the original writing and similar epic fantasy stories is that the heroes are just a bit faster, stronger, more skilled, and more lucky than their adversaries. Think of the medieval fantasy equivalent to James Bond, Rambo, Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon's Riggs (in fighting ability if not in humor), or True Lies' Harry Tasker. Each manages to handle dozens of opponents, even multiple at any given time. Instead, Peter Jackson gave us the medieval fantasy equivalent to The Avengers or Kung Fu Panda and I think it's a terrible fit for the genre.
Even the use of big battle sequences might have been forgivable if they seem to fit the story. But instead, the dwarves fight like each one is just about as tough and difficult to harm as the terminator, the elves fight like they're major characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the fearsome orcs and goblins "bred for war" die so fast and easily one thinks Azog might conquer more territory by arming a bunch of Hobbits.
I thought the scenery was beautiful, the costumes stunning, the sets breathtaking, and outside of combat most of the character interactions were reasonable and enjoyable. I especially did like the relationship Thorin and Bilbo develop over the films. But otherwise, there's two or three hours of good film in there.
To be fair, my sons love it and if it gets them to read more I'll call it a winner, period.
Yeah, of all the dumb elements in the film, the spice worms annoyed me the most. Why didn't the orcs have them dig directly into Erebor, and take the fortress from inside and then have any elves and dwarves that were outside face attack from two directions?
I was assuming a standard Visual Studio Professional subscription: http://www.visualstudio.com/pr... ($1200 per user per year). Maybe you can negotiate big discounts. I never tried. I saw $1200 and balked.:)
You have it backwards. I'm saying that for the past 5 years Microsoft's technologies have been competitive very consistently in every domain - operating systems, office suites, browsers, toolkits, databases, security, you name it. Before that their technology was inconsistent in quality.
For performance,.NET has compile-time optimization. Java has runtime optimization..NET uses less memory to launch, and starts faster, and in many applications (especially desktop applications) that's an advantage. But for long running applications like a web server, the Java Virtual Machine has the edge because it profiles the running code and rewrites it on the fly, which offers better optimization than compile-time optimization.
Sorry, I was only considering non-GUI applications since that's the playground I know. I realize benchmarking is complex and difficult territory to traverse, but for example at http://www.techempower.com/ben... the best Java implementations consistently beat the best IIS+C#, though admittedly not be a lot. I'm not aware of public, reproducible benchmarks on Windows JVM + Tomcat vs. CLR + IIS - and I'm assuming if they existed and showed CLR doing well, Microsoft would be shouting them from the rooftops.
I agree that for mobile, it makes more sense to use HTML5 + Javascipt wherever it can fit.
I don't love Java or Oracle, I just consider them less of an evil in the 1980+ history of computing than Microsoft. (And "more evil than Oracle" is a high bar to cross.)
To be realistic, licensing costs aren't a factor. Think about it. Assume five moderately good developers cost $500,000 a year, and you can choose to use free (as in beer or speech) products on the server and on developer environments. If using Windows costs you 5 Windows 7 or 8.1 business licenses ($1000), 5 MSDN subscriptions ($6000), and your software runs on five big iron servers with two sockets each and you put Windows Data Center Edition on them ($30,000), and a few Client Access Licenses (I have no idea what that would cost, $300? $5000?) and one Microsoft consultant to spend a month setting all of that up ($20,000, all together that's still in the neighborhood of $60,000. If you get a 12% boost to productivity for using Microsoft, you break even on costs and get your releases out faster. That's a win. If you get a bigger boost to productivity, so much the better.
Proprietary software costs aren't really a problem for most companies. It's a factor, but a relatively small one. The real question isn't whether you can afford the $60,000 (or whatever) - if you can't afford the $60,000, you have bigger problems. The question for a business planner is whether the $60,000 gets you enough advantages to justify it. Where proprietary software costs suck is for the working poor and lower middle class, and people trying to learn enough to get an entry level job in tech support, system administration, or software development. I know people making a third of my income who will throw out a $400 laptop after Windows is corrupted. It would cost $150 to get a new copy of Windows, $200 to get Windows fixed or re-imaged by a PC repair shop. So they just junk the thing and borrow money to get a $400 replacement. How much easier would it be to put Xubuntu on it for the $10 it costs to get a 4GB USB flash drive?
Frankly, Microsoft at its worst in the day never bothered me as much as Apple and even Google now. I can still put together a great computer out of parts, and like it or not, Microsoft did play a role in making that market. It's good that Linux, etc came along and provided choices, but if the Apple model had prevailed, I think technology would not be as far along. But it's impossible to say what if.
In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft crushed competing office suites with underhanded moves. So if that hadn't happened, maybe we would have Microsoft Office competing on a more even playing field against Corel Office, Star Office, and a dozen other players - and all of the vendors, including Microsoft, offering their product for cheaper than what Office costs now. Today everybody gets Microsoft Office because everybody else is already using Microsoft Office.
And in operating systems, remember that Microsoft again used dishonest and in some cases illegal tactics to crush competitors. They killed DR-DOS, OS/2, BeOS, and AmigaOS. They almost completely killed Apple, the company nearly collapsed and only survived because Microsoft loaned them $150 million in 1997 - and Microsoft only did that to forestall the anti-trust prosecution it had rightly earned. Again, imagine a market today in which the desktop PCs as well as mobile devices had one or two or three or five more active players with at least 5% market share. Maybe some of them are like Apple and sell a complete bundled hardware and software product, and maybe some would have been like Microsoft and just sold software. Even if those competing operating systems were all proprietary, the competition between vendors would push innovation much harder and have them struggling to provide the best reliability, uptime, security, and user experience for the lowest price. HP tried to do something with Palm and WebOS for desktops a few years ago, but they killed it before it even launched due to lack of interest. Windows is business PCs, period.
Now maybe, technical or business errors by those competing office suite vendors or competing operating system vendors would have killed their products anyway. Maybe Microsoft would have won its current position purely on technical merit. But we'll never get a chance to find that out.
.NET performance isn't better, I don't know where you got that from..NET startup is better - non-Micro-Edition versions of the Java Virtual Machine load the whole Java language standard library at startup, and it's a pretty big standard library, so it is slower and uses more memory than a.NET application at startup. But the Java Virtual Machine has the HotSpot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) which does runtime alteration and optimization of code. What that means is that for long-running code - which is of course the common case for web servers - the Java Virtual Machine monitors the execution profile of methods and once a method is executed around 10,000 times it will examine it and if it can find common cases or frequently used code paths it will dynamically rewrite the method or inline it to make it faster. As far as I know,.NET has nothing similar - performance never changes.
The Java Virtual Machine is also a runtime..NET supports C#, VB.net, F#, Nemerle, and a number of other languages. The Java Virtual Machine supports Java, Ruby, Python, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Scheme (Kawa), Lisp (ABCL), Javascript, and a number of other languages.
And last but most importantly, it's been more than five years since I rejected Microsoft options out of hand for technical reasons. But I still reject them for ethical ones. This is a company that intentionally modified APIs to break third party applications, lied about software releases and features to hurt competitors, made business deals that are illegal under US anti-trust law with OEMs to block competition, waged countless FUD campaigns throughout its life, and wields its intellectual property resources like a weapon of mass economic destruction to squash innovative competitors. Where would the world technology industry be today if we didn't have this trillion dollar parasite doing more work than any other factor to stifle competition?
I'm a software developer, and I had a pretty easy time with my last job search too. He's not. But he applied in about twenty states and was willing to take a big pay cut from his previous job to get back to work. The market's just harsher than it was 20 years ago - more competition for fewer good jobs.
Thanks for responding to his trollish comment on immigrants. I have a graduate degree and a six figure income, but most of my caucasian ancestors arrived on American shores illiterate and penniless and worked for coal barons.
The whole idea that there's mass laziness to blame is a convenient excuse for cutting social services. There are millions of people who would trade a limb for a $12 per hour job and medical benefits, and who are tireless and driven in their work habits. The jobs just aren't there. My dad just got back to work after six months unemployed. He kept a spreadsheet of all of the places he applied at and where he was in the interview process. He got into the low 400s before he got a job offer - which he took.
Kawa has optional static types? Cool. By the way - thanks for all of your work on Kawa, it looks really neat. I'm sorry I hadn't heard about it sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
The features of D doesn't seem like anything that isn't solved (but perhaps in an ugly way) by C++11 and Boost.
Except D has compile-time evaluation of a significant subset of the language as its alternative to the C++ preprocessor. That, among other things, means large D projects compile orders of magnitude faster than equivalent size C or C++ projects. Fast compile times were one of the killer features touted when Google launched their 'Go' language, but D compiles as quickly or more quickly and is a lot closer to "C++11 with simpler syntax" than Go.
But if you're going to switch tools, why not go for broke and switch to a pure functional language that will completely alter the way you have to design your software, perhaps in the ML family?
Fair point. I can't argue with that.
I'm aware of the studies. I've read and applied Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert, just about half the books by Ellington Darden, the Nautilus Bulletins by Arthur Jones, Heavy Duty 2 by Mike Mentzer, every article at Cyberpump (back when all of the site content was free), Power Factor Training by John Little and Pete Sisco, articles by Doug McGuff and Drew Baye, and even the Power of 10 by Adam Zickerman and Super Slow: The Ultimate Exercise Protocol by Ken Hutchins. I've also read the fitness research paper published in the June 2004 edition of the Journal of Exercise Physiology online. I've worked out as often as every other day to as infrequently as once every three weeks. I've done routines with full body single set circuits at each workout. I've also done routines with different muscle group splits. I've trained to concentric failure, to static failure, and even occasionally to eccentric failure. All that from 1996 to 2014 and in all cases the gains stopped after the first few weeks and plateaued for months until I quit and started over.
The only thing great about HIT is that it's easier on the joints. When I do higher volume work I tend to develop joint pain, and of course in the long run it's better to have barely-better-than-untrained muscles and healthy joints than strong muscles and damaged joints.
Strength training studies are problematic. A trainee can hold back at the initial strength test, thus giving false gains at the end of the study. The trainees can do additional workouts outside of the supervision of the study supervisors. Study participants can be using steroids. Perhaps worst of all, regaining muscle mass you formerly possessed tends to be much faster than gaining new muscle mass. ( There are several studies that document this. One such link: http://www.thinkmuscle.com/art... ) Most workout studies don't control for the influence of this factor on outcomes or try to control for it but only rely upon word-of-mouth of the study participants, which is unreliable. So if you conduct a strength study and your random assignment of subjects puts five people that each used to have twenty more pounds of muscle mass in one group, they're going to make much greater gains in a shorter time than other subjects in the same group, and skew your results. If you're familiar with Arthur Jones' "Colorado Experiment", the two research subjects had both gained and then lost over thirty pounds of muscle in the years before the experiment. So the fact that they made massive gains on HIT doesn't mean anything for trainees that had never previously had thirty additional pounds of muscle.
I've heard that explanation before, but it always strikes me as a retcon made by people associated with the film once software professionals started lampooning it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
It's a difficult genre, right? It would be very difficult to make a real film about hacking interesting or understandable to the average person. So you've got the difficult task of making it dramatic and understandable without turning it into cyber-fantasy.
For the physical fitness - but nothing else - you can assume the guy got into great physical condition after going to prison. According to my cousin the prison guard, a lot of prisoners get into great shape - they have nothing to do all day, so exercising around the clock is just a way to pass the time.
In my experience, an hour three times a week will carry you for a month or two and then all progress will stop no matter how hard you push during those three hours. To go further, you need a higher volume of work - or maybe anabolic steroids.
The reason people in boot camp, people in prison, and personal trainers get into great shape isn't an hour of hard work here or there and days of rest. Instead they have work, rest, work, rest, work rest throughout the day for days at a time. The soldiers work that way because they have instructors breathing down their necks, the prisoners work that way because they're totally bored and doing another sets of pushups, pullups, and burpees is just a way to pass the time, and the trainers work that way because they keep demonstrating exercises and moving weights in position and leading exercise classes and working out to kill time between clients.
Trying to tell John Q Public he can look like Chris Hemsworth on three hours of work a week is a marketing gimmick for people trying to sell exercise DVDs, fitness magazines, and gym memberships. If they said, "You can look like this with just three moderate workouts per day, six days per week!" they couldn't pay rent.
You don't need a Core i7 running at 3.6 GHz to run Minecraft, and that's the CPU and CPU speed the author was complaining about. If he needs that kind of performance, he's working his laptop five or ten times harder (of course I'm making that number up, I can't make an educated guess at the exact value) than you work yours. Minecraft works fine on a PC I have from early 2006, a core i7 can probably run it at idle.
But I think the great majority of people are fine with a laptop. I work on a medium size Java application and my laptop runs an IDE, a few browsers with many tabs, Maven, git, virtualization software, etc... all without hiccups, and I only have an Intel core i5. What percentage of PC users outside people running high end games need more computing power than that? (Oh, and if anyone wants to bash Java, be my guest - I don't love it either, but it pays the bills.)
I like the look a lot. But my first friend to get a device with Lollipop - a Nexus 6 - had a crash-happy experience. I haven't had any crashes on Android 4.4.2 since I got my current device nine months ago, why would I give that up for something that obviously got pushed to customers before it was ready?
Well, if you're going to blow the source material to hell than I guess throwing in some Harkkonens would be fun too. Maybe add Darth Vader while you're at it, and General Zod.
Good point - you are correct and I don't dispute what you write.
However, my interpretation of the original writing and similar epic fantasy stories is that the heroes are just a bit faster, stronger, more skilled, and more lucky than their adversaries. Think of the medieval fantasy equivalent to James Bond, Rambo, Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon's Riggs (in fighting ability if not in humor), or True Lies' Harry Tasker. Each manages to handle dozens of opponents, even multiple at any given time. Instead, Peter Jackson gave us the medieval fantasy equivalent to The Avengers or Kung Fu Panda and I think it's a terrible fit for the genre.
Even the use of big battle sequences might have been forgivable if they seem to fit the story. But instead, the dwarves fight like each one is just about as tough and difficult to harm as the terminator, the elves fight like they're major characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the fearsome orcs and goblins "bred for war" die so fast and easily one thinks Azog might conquer more territory by arming a bunch of Hobbits.
I thought the scenery was beautiful, the costumes stunning, the sets breathtaking, and outside of combat most of the character interactions were reasonable and enjoyable. I especially did like the relationship Thorin and Bilbo develop over the films. But otherwise, there's two or three hours of good film in there.
To be fair, my sons love it and if it gets them to read more I'll call it a winner, period.
Yeah, of all the dumb elements in the film, the spice worms annoyed me the most. Why didn't the orcs have them dig directly into Erebor, and take the fortress from inside and then have any elves and dwarves that were outside face attack from two directions?
I was assuming a standard Visual Studio Professional subscription: http://www.visualstudio.com/pr... ($1200 per user per year). Maybe you can negotiate big discounts. I never tried. I saw $1200 and balked. :)
You have it backwards. I'm saying that for the past 5 years Microsoft's technologies have been competitive very consistently in every domain - operating systems, office suites, browsers, toolkits, databases, security, you name it. Before that their technology was inconsistent in quality.
.NET has compile-time optimization. Java has runtime optimization. .NET uses less memory to launch, and starts faster, and in many applications (especially desktop applications) that's an advantage. But for long running applications like a web server, the Java Virtual Machine has the edge because it profiles the running code and rewrites it on the fly, which offers better optimization than compile-time optimization.
For performance,
Excellent point, thanks.
(Edit - I should have been more broad, Windows JVM + Tomcat/Jetty/Netty vs. CLR + IIS, not just Tomcat.)
Sorry, I was only considering non-GUI applications since that's the playground I know. I realize benchmarking is complex and difficult territory to traverse, but for example at http://www.techempower.com/ben... the best Java implementations consistently beat the best IIS+C#, though admittedly not be a lot. I'm not aware of public, reproducible benchmarks on Windows JVM + Tomcat vs. CLR + IIS - and I'm assuming if they existed and showed CLR doing well, Microsoft would be shouting them from the rooftops.
I agree that for mobile, it makes more sense to use HTML5 + Javascipt wherever it can fit.
I don't love Java or Oracle, I just consider them less of an evil in the 1980+ history of computing than Microsoft. (And "more evil than Oracle" is a high bar to cross.)
Thanks for the information. I did not know that.
Benchmarks?
To be realistic, licensing costs aren't a factor. Think about it. Assume five moderately good developers cost $500,000 a year, and you can choose to use free (as in beer or speech) products on the server and on developer environments. If using Windows costs you 5 Windows 7 or 8.1 business licenses ($1000), 5 MSDN subscriptions ($6000), and your software runs on five big iron servers with two sockets each and you put Windows Data Center Edition on them ($30,000), and a few Client Access Licenses (I have no idea what that would cost, $300? $5000?) and one Microsoft consultant to spend a month setting all of that up ($20,000, all together that's still in the neighborhood of $60,000. If you get a 12% boost to productivity for using Microsoft, you break even on costs and get your releases out faster. That's a win. If you get a bigger boost to productivity, so much the better.
Proprietary software costs aren't really a problem for most companies. It's a factor, but a relatively small one. The real question isn't whether you can afford the $60,000 (or whatever) - if you can't afford the $60,000, you have bigger problems. The question for a business planner is whether the $60,000 gets you enough advantages to justify it. Where proprietary software costs suck is for the working poor and lower middle class, and people trying to learn enough to get an entry level job in tech support, system administration, or software development. I know people making a third of my income who will throw out a $400 laptop after Windows is corrupted. It would cost $150 to get a new copy of Windows, $200 to get Windows fixed or re-imaged by a PC repair shop. So they just junk the thing and borrow money to get a $400 replacement. How much easier would it be to put Xubuntu on it for the $10 it costs to get a 4GB USB flash drive?
Frankly, Microsoft at its worst in the day never bothered me as much as Apple and even Google now. I can still put together a great computer out of parts, and like it or not, Microsoft did play a role in making that market. It's good that Linux, etc came along and provided choices, but if the Apple model had prevailed, I think technology would not be as far along. But it's impossible to say what if.
In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft crushed competing office suites with underhanded moves. So if that hadn't happened, maybe we would have Microsoft Office competing on a more even playing field against Corel Office, Star Office, and a dozen other players - and all of the vendors, including Microsoft, offering their product for cheaper than what Office costs now. Today everybody gets Microsoft Office because everybody else is already using Microsoft Office.
And in operating systems, remember that Microsoft again used dishonest and in some cases illegal tactics to crush competitors. They killed DR-DOS, OS/2, BeOS, and AmigaOS. They almost completely killed Apple, the company nearly collapsed and only survived because Microsoft loaned them $150 million in 1997 - and Microsoft only did that to forestall the anti-trust prosecution it had rightly earned. Again, imagine a market today in which the desktop PCs as well as mobile devices had one or two or three or five more active players with at least 5% market share. Maybe some of them are like Apple and sell a complete bundled hardware and software product, and maybe some would have been like Microsoft and just sold software. Even if those competing operating systems were all proprietary, the competition between vendors would push innovation much harder and have them struggling to provide the best reliability, uptime, security, and user experience for the lowest price. HP tried to do something with Palm and WebOS for desktops a few years ago, but they killed it before it even launched due to lack of interest. Windows is business PCs, period.
Now maybe, technical or business errors by those competing office suite vendors or competing operating system vendors would have killed their products anyway. Maybe Microsoft would have won its current position purely on technical merit. But we'll never get a chance to find that out.
No, Oracle is not any better. The only advantage we have is that Java was opened before Oracle bought Sun.
.NET performance isn't better, I don't know where you got that from. .NET startup is better - non-Micro-Edition versions of the Java Virtual Machine load the whole Java language standard library at startup, and it's a pretty big standard library, so it is slower and uses more memory than a .NET application at startup. But the Java Virtual Machine has the HotSpot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) which does runtime alteration and optimization of code. What that means is that for long-running code - which is of course the common case for web servers - the Java Virtual Machine monitors the execution profile of methods and once a method is executed around 10,000 times it will examine it and if it can find common cases or frequently used code paths it will dynamically rewrite the method or inline it to make it faster. As far as I know, .NET has nothing similar - performance never changes.
.NET supports C#, VB.net, F#, Nemerle, and a number of other languages. The Java Virtual Machine supports Java, Ruby, Python, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Scheme (Kawa), Lisp (ABCL), Javascript, and a number of other languages.
The Java Virtual Machine is also a runtime.
And last but most importantly, it's been more than five years since I rejected Microsoft options out of hand for technical reasons. But I still reject them for ethical ones. This is a company that intentionally modified APIs to break third party applications, lied about software releases and features to hurt competitors, made business deals that are illegal under US anti-trust law with OEMs to block competition, waged countless FUD campaigns throughout its life, and wields its intellectual property resources like a weapon of mass economic destruction to squash innovative competitors. Where would the world technology industry be today if we didn't have this trillion dollar parasite doing more work than any other factor to stifle competition?
I'm a software developer, and I had a pretty easy time with my last job search too. He's not. But he applied in about twenty states and was willing to take a big pay cut from his previous job to get back to work. The market's just harsher than it was 20 years ago - more competition for fewer good jobs.
Thanks for responding to his trollish comment on immigrants. I have a graduate degree and a six figure income, but most of my caucasian ancestors arrived on American shores illiterate and penniless and worked for coal barons.
The whole idea that there's mass laziness to blame is a convenient excuse for cutting social services. There are millions of people who would trade a limb for a $12 per hour job and medical benefits, and who are tireless and driven in their work habits. The jobs just aren't there. My dad just got back to work after six months unemployed. He kept a spreadsheet of all of the places he applied at and where he was in the interview process. He got into the low 400s before he got a job offer - which he took.
Kawa has optional static types? Cool. By the way - thanks for all of your work on Kawa, it looks really neat. I'm sorry I hadn't heard about it sooner.