AronRa. It's possible I'm old and out of touch, but I have to think your son would find him cool.
He fails most of your criteria -- he's still a student (in his spare time) though he certainly seems to know his stuff, he's a scientist/biker (and definitely looks the 'biker' part), he's likely not young enough -- but I'd encourage your son to look at the man before passing judgment (I hope I look that good at that age), and if third-graders nationwide knew anything about him, I have to imagine they'd feel the same way.
If it wants, it can store a few numbers, and show me if I have a message waiting.
This one can't. It has "speed dial", but if you actually want an address book, they give you a pad of paper.
Really?
I agree there's a lot more nonsense than we need, and I would like a phone with fewer features. But this looks like it's worse at being "just a phone" than my current phone/camera/etc.
If you're seriously considering this phone, especially paying extra for it -- have you seen it? RTFA.
Let me put it this way: Why would you want a phone without at least an address book? I'm with you that it's gotten out of control, but why would I want a paper address-book stuck to the phone, so I can take it off the back, flip through it, and manually type that into the front? Every time I want to call someone, I'd have to do that.
Or I can press probably fewer buttons than it would take to actually dial the number, and only have to remember the person's name.
Yes, I do "just want a fucking phone." But this isn't just a fucking phone -- the paper addressbook does indeed scream "technophobe."
For something I only need to view, I'll still take PDF, especially now that ODF is recognized natively by recent versions of MS Office -- I really don't trust Office to get it right.
And I'd still take HTML over any of the above.
Now, for something I need to edit and needs to be printable, I'll take ODF. But that's about it -- in general, I see office software as relics of the print age. I don't care about margins, page breaks, or fonts. I care about scalability, portability, links, and content.
That still leaves the option to dismiss one or two students as an example, and generally deal with first-time offenses by cutting Internet access.
I'm not quite sure what I'd do in that situation, to be honest. I do get that I'd want to be protesting and doing everything I can to challenge the system, but at the same time, getting banned from the school's network for even a day would be inconvenient, to say the least.
Trivial example: I'm currently finishing an assignment which I intend to print in a computer lab, for free -- I get a certain quota of free pages from the Com Sci department. Since that building is closed now, I intend to do it first thing in the morning -- and the assignment is due at 9 am tomorrow. If they so much as cut access to my laptop, that would be a major hassle to have to go find a USB drive (haven't used it in months), transfer my homework to that, then go find a computer in the computer lab, try to remember my normal and com sci passwords (I have my browser remember the normal one, and I just use SSH for com sci access)...
And if they disable my access to the network as a whole? Oh shit, now I have to grab that drive and run to the basement of the library, where there's a copy room in which I can print pages without an account, using cash...
Oh wait. I use my University ID as a debit card and for "CyCash", so I don't tend to carry cash. I guess I need to run to an ATM and then back...
That's at least half an hour of sheer, raw panic and likely some very late homework. It's probably a legitimate excuse, and they probably would just block a single machine's access, but I can't afford that kind of bullshit -- I'd more likely just make sure I never use BitTorrent without going through a VPN first.
Similar kinds of things happen if I need to do research. My normal process: Start with Wikipedia for ideas, get actual sources from Google Scholar or the library website, maybe send a text to my phone with the call numbers and location in the library of any books I might need. Kill my network access and I now have to do all of the above from a library kiosk, or a lab computer.
Maybe I'm thinking too small. Maybe it'd be better if I said, fuck this semester's grades, I want action so future semesters are better, even if they're at another college.
Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice. Sure, there are things I could do on the university's network that'd get me at least temporarily banned, but they tend to involve things that actually directly sabotage everyone else's Internet, like plugging a wireless router in backwards so the entire floor is effectively DoS'd.
Does that mean the university-owned computers that are meant only for educational purposes? Or does this mean the privately owned computers that students have in their own rooms where they live?
Do whatever you want with your own computer. It's what you do with the university's network that they get to have some say about.
Or, think of it this way: If I have a network in my house, I absolutely can dictate terms. No torrenting while I'm trying to play games, or at least throttle it. No torrenting period on the wireless, ever. And so on. They can be as arbitrary as I like -- if you don't like it, go somewhere else.
This only becomes questionable if you start to think of the university as an ISP. There's some validity to that (especially considering housing fees), but it's still far, far from telling you what you can and can't do with your computer.
I can't even make the same case about the University of Iowa, where if they "catch" you downloading something, they'll block your Internet access until you bring your computer in so you can prove to them that the offending material is gone. Oh, and they have a ridiculously low upload cap, and they don't exactly go out of their way to tell you that it's there, or how you can throttle yourself to avoid inadvertently triggering it. (Forget Warcraft and Starcraft -- my brother actually hit a Flash video which somehow used P2P streaming.)
I agree it's childish, but again, unless we're claiming they're an ISP, they should be allowed to do what they want with their network.
If I lived at a campus where the university would rat on me everytime I would download something that may be illegal (but isn't necessarily) - I would be out of there.
I tend to agree, but it does severely limit your options.
But as I said, Iowa State isn't like that. They don't "rat on you" to anyone -- instead, they warn you, in the friendliest way possible -- basically, they say "We're not going to do anything other than send you these annoying emails, but if we could see you were filesharing, so can the **AA. Better watch your back."
I like that. That's a legitimately useful service. And you can opt out.
And I don't say this out of patriotism -- there are plenty of things I don't like about this school. But this thing in particular, every university should follow that model.
In any case, I think the point stands -- you take some performance hit by leaving JRuby (if you have to), for now. And it's not like JRuby are the only people working on making Ruby fast.
Problem: While the police may not do anything, the university would be entirely within its rights to ban you from their network or dismiss you from the university altogether. It's their network, and they do have the right to be dicks about it.
The only solution I know of is to go to the few universities which get it right. I'm at Iowa State, which does just about the bare minimum -- if they detect you using P2P software, they send you an automated email which says something along the lines of: "If we can see you're torrenting, so can the MPAA. Just thought you should know." You can opt-out of this email, also.
They used to throttle, but they don't seem to anymore, and they certainly aren't going out of their way to help the **AA, though of course if you are caught, they'd probably be happy to identify you by IP.
In other words, they realize this is not their problem, and so they're not spending time or money hassling students about it.
b+d) Errr... I use evince. It's more or less comparable to Foxit performance on Windows.
And I use Okular. Either way, take out Adobe Reader and I just don't see them being slow, and there haven't been terribly many cross-platform PDF exploits.
a+c) Kind of my point. Stop inflicting PDF on us in situations where it detracts from rather than adds to a pleasant use experience.
Sure, but if the choice is between PDF and DOC, I'll take the PDF. I think that was the original poster's point.
b and d are really Adobe's fault, and can be fixed by using another reader. a and c aren't really what PDF was designed for, and are also flaws in HTML.
CPython is more performant than Ruby, last I checked, but that gap is closing all the time.
However, every other runtime you mentioned can hardly be called more mature or more performant than JRuby, unless something has changed.
Also, Rubygems kicks ass, especially compared to "eggs", especially with Bundler. I'm not sure having more third-party libraries is that useful if it's a hassle to install and manage them.
And what's "really, really bad" about MRI/YARV vs JRuby?
In particular, Ruby 1.9 isn't much slower than JRuby, and is faster in some cases. JRuby is awesome, but the point is that you are in no way locked into the JVM by using JRuby.
If all you care about is being the most employable, PHP/Java/.NET and JavaScript are your best options.
As for something which has a future, I like Ruby. The mainstream implementations are all open source and (so far as we know) patent-free. I'd seriously consider deploying to JRuby these days, but it's reasonably compatible, so you certainly wouldn't be locked into Java.
Python would be another good choice, but I think Ruby has it better in terms of the number of entirely distinct implementations. If Oracle sues JRuby out of existence, there's still the mainstream C implementation (MRI) with multiple interesting branches, MacRuby is looking interesting, and IronRuby strikes me as at about the stage Jython is.
My point is that BP is not an altruistic organization, and is required by law to do what's in the best interests of their shareholders,
Cleaning up the mess is in the best interests of the shareholders who happen to live there. Building a better public image, and keeping the Earth habitable, are both likely to be good investments in the long term compared to the alternative.
So, altruism and "best interests of their shareholders" aren't mutually exclusive. In particular, take a good hard look at what happened to BP and Transocean stock after the oil spill...
Really, you mean I, with almost zero programming skills could do it? Could my friend with zero programming skills do it?
Could either of you use CDE?
I mean, we are talking about CDE as a developer tool, right? If a developer can use that, it certainly is "easy enough" for them to make the data format portable.
apt-get or yum are not options in these environments...
Really? Why not?
Put another way: Rubygems can install to a home directory, and only requires Ruby itself to be in the path. Are you saying that the sandbox environment doesn't allow you to have reliable filesystem access or modify your environment variables? Because that's all it takes.
I realize apt-get or yum may require system-level access in their current configuration, but if they can be configured per-user, that's a limitation in apt-get or yum, not in the idea of a package manager.
firing up a VM each time you want to run an application is very heavyweight...
Not necessarily, especially when VMs can be cloned with COW memory.
the cluster may be composed of heterogenous set of machines with different versions of Linux.
Doesn't seem like an insoluble problem, either. If you're just going to statically link anyway, bundling system libraries doesn't seem like that big a stretch. A chroot jail would be a better solution (and I think BSD has a secure version of these), but you can fake that without root anyway.
The advantage of doing things this way is that you still get the advantages of dynamic linking (lower memory and disk usage for multiple programs installed, easier updates, etc). The only component missing is admin rights, and there's nothing special about admin rights that relates to any of these.
So, TD;DR: This looks like just another case where the correct solution was staring you in the face, but you went with the easy solution instead. That's not necessarily wrong -- you could actually make a much better case that it's too hard to write a proper package manager for this environment, and there's too small of a target audience to justify the effort, compared to a simpler solution which just Gets It Done.
But then, why is CDE a big enough deal to be Slashdotted? Presumably it took a significant amount of work...
Outputting C is generally a bad idea, even if the rest of the language is a good idea. There's a reason that while technically every valid C program should be a valid C++ program, we still have separate C and C++ compilers, and C++ compilers don't output C.
But as another poster clarified, the performance gap is down to something like 20% between Java and C, and Java will give me things I don't think your choices can, like actual runtime reflection and optimizations. Also, a quick glance at Eiffel shows it has some sort of garbage collection, so is it really as fast as C?
At this point, unless it looks like Oracle is actually going to kill Java, I'll take a high-level JVM language over a high-level compiled-to-C language any day. JRuby is actually getting pretty insanely fast.
At this point C# and the CLR has quite a bit less Microsoft lock in than Java and its Oracle lock in.
How so?
The licenses around C# and mono are really pretty good.
Better than the licenses around OpenJDK?
Mono is GPL2/LGPL2/MIT and gives the C# compiler and CLR.
It's also incomplete compared to mainstream.NET. OpenJDK has the full 15 years of research and optimizations piled into the JVM, and so far, we get pretty much the same JVM they do.
While the CLR may be theoretically better at handling other languages, the JVM has the benefit of multiple production-ready languages targeting it -- Java, Scala, Clojure, and JRuby come to mind, and I don't know of four production-ready CLR languages.
C# and CLI are ISO and ECMA standards with RAND licensing. That's about as good as it gets really.
It's close, but note that "RAND licensing" says nothing about licensing cost, particularly licensing cost with respect to patents. So that puts.NET in exactly the same place Java is -- either Microsoft or Oracle could suddenly decide to start charging for the patents required for either platform.
I challenge you to name something without patent risks.
It helps when a platform has been around for 15 years without its creators ever trying to patent anything about it -- though that doesn't apply to Java.
In more practical terms, the preferred platform for.NET development is Visual Studio. The preferred platform for Java development is Eclipse.
So please, exactly where can Oracle lock Java in that Microsoft cannot lock.NET in? The only thing.NET has in its favor is Mono, which isn't quite equivalent -- and Java has its own share of not-quite-equivalent things, too, like Kaffe and gcj.
And all this is academic unless there's a reason to consider.NET in the first place.
Here's the problem: Intelligent, detail-oriented people make mistakes.
after a few years of training can instinctively and deliberately avoid bugs both the subtle and the egregious...
If you can find a single programmer who actually does that, post their "flawless" code along with a sufficiently-motivating bounty and see how long it lasts. To be fair, you should have some way to verify the amount of time it took to produce this code.
In the real world...
Wait, back up.
higher-level languages like Java that do everything for you including tying your shoes for you...
Wow. You're actually claiming Java ties your shoes for you? Java, the only language I know of where == can't be counted on for equality (because Operator Overloading is Bad, mmkay?), where primitives are special cases, where null is a special case, where threading is still handled via the same primitives as in languages like C or C++... That language?
Seriously?
I'm just going to pretend you didn't say that, so I can pretend you had an intelligent point worth my time to respond.
So, in the real world, where Java is only moderately higher-level than C/C++, programmers can and do make mistakes occasionally. Even the best occasionally make stupid mistakes. Just off the top of my head:
Yeah, I know it's stupid, first-year mistakes. But think about the concepts you had to summon up to tell me why that's wrong. And of course, if I do it this way:
Now the caller is responsible for cleaning up after me. Sure, I can create a function that helps, if foo had a bunch of additional stuff that needs to be individually free'd or otherwise released, but they still need to call that. If they don't, I leak memory.
We can do that, or we can do C++, where we get gems like this:
class B: public A... A a; B b; a = b;// whoops, the contents of b just got sliced!
Or if I decide to use the heap...
A *a = new A(); a = new B();// whoops, I just leaked the old value of a!
Even if you do manage to do it perfectly every time, you're still spending far more time -- even the sheer amount of typing saved not having to deal with this bullshit is significant. And you won't do it perfectly every time.
And when you screw it up in C/C++, you leak memory, segfault, corrupt yourself, or introduce a security vulnerability. When you screw it up in Java, so long as you're not using threads, about the worst you do is a null pointer exception.
Yes, you can leak memory, corrupt yourself, or be insecure in Java, but an entire class of bugs are now not possible. It is no longer possible to segfault, and it is no longer possible to introduce security vulnerabilities or leak memory through your use of pointers or references.
And you know what? For 99% of what I do with a computer, I'll gladly take a 50% performance hit for fewer bugs. In fact, I'll gladly take a 95% performance hit (and I routinely do) for even fewer bugs and (much) faster development. It's just more important for it to be reliable and maintainable than it is to satisfy someone's ego about how smart they are that they can use pointers.
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AronRa. It's possible I'm old and out of touch, but I have to think your son would find him cool.
He fails most of your criteria -- he's still a student (in his spare time) though he certainly seems to know his stuff, he's a scientist/biker (and definitely looks the 'biker' part), he's likely not young enough -- but I'd encourage your son to look at the man before passing judgment (I hope I look that good at that age), and if third-graders nationwide knew anything about him, I have to imagine they'd feel the same way.
If it wants, it can store a few numbers, and show me if I have a message waiting.
This one can't. It has "speed dial", but if you actually want an address book, they give you a pad of paper.
Really?
I agree there's a lot more nonsense than we need, and I would like a phone with fewer features. But this looks like it's worse at being "just a phone" than my current phone/camera/etc.
If you're seriously considering this phone, especially paying extra for it -- have you seen it? RTFA.
Let me put it this way: Why would you want a phone without at least an address book? I'm with you that it's gotten out of control, but why would I want a paper address-book stuck to the phone, so I can take it off the back, flip through it, and manually type that into the front? Every time I want to call someone, I'd have to do that.
Or I can press probably fewer buttons than it would take to actually dial the number, and only have to remember the person's name.
Yes, I do "just want a fucking phone." But this isn't just a fucking phone -- the paper addressbook does indeed scream "technophobe."
What if the choice is between PDF, DOC and ODF?
For something I only need to view, I'll still take PDF, especially now that ODF is recognized natively by recent versions of MS Office -- I really don't trust Office to get it right.
And I'd still take HTML over any of the above.
Now, for something I need to edit and needs to be printable, I'll take ODF. But that's about it -- in general, I see office software as relics of the print age. I don't care about margins, page breaks, or fonts. I care about scalability, portability, links, and content.
That still leaves the option to dismiss one or two students as an example, and generally deal with first-time offenses by cutting Internet access.
I'm not quite sure what I'd do in that situation, to be honest. I do get that I'd want to be protesting and doing everything I can to challenge the system, but at the same time, getting banned from the school's network for even a day would be inconvenient, to say the least.
Trivial example: I'm currently finishing an assignment which I intend to print in a computer lab, for free -- I get a certain quota of free pages from the Com Sci department. Since that building is closed now, I intend to do it first thing in the morning -- and the assignment is due at 9 am tomorrow. If they so much as cut access to my laptop, that would be a major hassle to have to go find a USB drive (haven't used it in months), transfer my homework to that, then go find a computer in the computer lab, try to remember my normal and com sci passwords (I have my browser remember the normal one, and I just use SSH for com sci access)...
And if they disable my access to the network as a whole? Oh shit, now I have to grab that drive and run to the basement of the library, where there's a copy room in which I can print pages without an account, using cash...
Oh wait. I use my University ID as a debit card and for "CyCash", so I don't tend to carry cash. I guess I need to run to an ATM and then back...
That's at least half an hour of sheer, raw panic and likely some very late homework. It's probably a legitimate excuse, and they probably would just block a single machine's access, but I can't afford that kind of bullshit -- I'd more likely just make sure I never use BitTorrent without going through a VPN first.
Similar kinds of things happen if I need to do research. My normal process: Start with Wikipedia for ideas, get actual sources from Google Scholar or the library website, maybe send a text to my phone with the call numbers and location in the library of any books I might need. Kill my network access and I now have to do all of the above from a library kiosk, or a lab computer.
Maybe I'm thinking too small. Maybe it'd be better if I said, fuck this semester's grades, I want action so future semesters are better, even if they're at another college.
Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice. Sure, there are things I could do on the university's network that'd get me at least temporarily banned, but they tend to involve things that actually directly sabotage everyone else's Internet, like plugging a wireless router in backwards so the entire floor is effectively DoS'd.
Makes a LOT of difference to me.
Makes no difference to me. Put it another way:
Does that mean the university-owned computers that are meant only for educational purposes? Or does this mean the privately owned computers that students have in their own rooms where they live?
Do whatever you want with your own computer. It's what you do with the university's network that they get to have some say about.
Or, think of it this way: If I have a network in my house, I absolutely can dictate terms. No torrenting while I'm trying to play games, or at least throttle it. No torrenting period on the wireless, ever. And so on. They can be as arbitrary as I like -- if you don't like it, go somewhere else.
This only becomes questionable if you start to think of the university as an ISP. There's some validity to that (especially considering housing fees), but it's still far, far from telling you what you can and can't do with your computer.
I can't even make the same case about the University of Iowa, where if they "catch" you downloading something, they'll block your Internet access until you bring your computer in so you can prove to them that the offending material is gone. Oh, and they have a ridiculously low upload cap, and they don't exactly go out of their way to tell you that it's there, or how you can throttle yourself to avoid inadvertently triggering it. (Forget Warcraft and Starcraft -- my brother actually hit a Flash video which somehow used P2P streaming.)
I agree it's childish, but again, unless we're claiming they're an ISP, they should be allowed to do what they want with their network.
If I lived at a campus where the university would rat on me everytime I would download something that may be illegal (but isn't necessarily) - I would be out of there.
I tend to agree, but it does severely limit your options.
But as I said, Iowa State isn't like that. They don't "rat on you" to anyone -- instead, they warn you, in the friendliest way possible -- basically, they say "We're not going to do anything other than send you these annoying emails, but if we could see you were filesharing, so can the **AA. Better watch your back."
I like that. That's a legitimately useful service. And you can opt out.
And I don't say this out of patriotism -- there are plenty of things I don't like about this school. But this thing in particular, every university should follow that model.
having a GIL in 2010 is utterly ridiculous.
Agreed, but really, tell it to Python.
In any case, I think the point stands -- you take some performance hit by leaving JRuby (if you have to), for now. And it's not like JRuby are the only people working on making Ruby fast.
Problem: While the police may not do anything, the university would be entirely within its rights to ban you from their network or dismiss you from the university altogether. It's their network, and they do have the right to be dicks about it.
The only solution I know of is to go to the few universities which get it right. I'm at Iowa State, which does just about the bare minimum -- if they detect you using P2P software, they send you an automated email which says something along the lines of: "If we can see you're torrenting, so can the MPAA. Just thought you should know." You can opt-out of this email, also.
They used to throttle, but they don't seem to anymore, and they certainly aren't going out of their way to help the **AA, though of course if you are caught, they'd probably be happy to identify you by IP.
In other words, they realize this is not their problem, and so they're not spending time or money hassling students about it.
b+d) Errr... I use evince. It's more or less comparable to Foxit performance on Windows.
And I use Okular. Either way, take out Adobe Reader and I just don't see them being slow, and there haven't been terribly many cross-platform PDF exploits.
a+c) Kind of my point. Stop inflicting PDF on us in situations where it detracts from rather than adds to a pleasant use experience.
Sure, but if the choice is between PDF and DOC, I'll take the PDF. I think that was the original poster's point.
OpenOffice has a save-to-PDF toolbar button.
b and d are really Adobe's fault, and can be fixed by using another reader. a and c aren't really what PDF was designed for, and are also flaws in HTML.
But I agree -- HTML would be better.
CPython is more performant than Ruby, last I checked, but that gap is closing all the time.
However, every other runtime you mentioned can hardly be called more mature or more performant than JRuby, unless something has changed.
Also, Rubygems kicks ass, especially compared to "eggs", especially with Bundler. I'm not sure having more third-party libraries is that useful if it's a hassle to install and manage them.
And why isn't 1.9.x suitable for the enterprise?
And what's "really, really bad" about MRI/YARV vs JRuby?
In particular, Ruby 1.9 isn't much slower than JRuby, and is faster in some cases. JRuby is awesome, but the point is that you are in no way locked into the JVM by using JRuby.
If all you care about is being the most employable, PHP/Java/.NET and JavaScript are your best options.
As for something which has a future, I like Ruby. The mainstream implementations are all open source and (so far as we know) patent-free. I'd seriously consider deploying to JRuby these days, but it's reasonably compatible, so you certainly wouldn't be locked into Java.
Python would be another good choice, but I think Ruby has it better in terms of the number of entirely distinct implementations. If Oracle sues JRuby out of existence, there's still the mainstream C implementation (MRI) with multiple interesting branches, MacRuby is looking interesting, and IronRuby strikes me as at about the stage Jython is.
I'm not sure how they've guaranteed any such thing, though. And are those execs really worth that much? (I guess I really don't want to know.)
My point is that BP is not an altruistic organization, and is required by law to do what's in the best interests of their shareholders,
Cleaning up the mess is in the best interests of the shareholders who happen to live there. Building a better public image, and keeping the Earth habitable, are both likely to be good investments in the long term compared to the alternative.
So, altruism and "best interests of their shareholders" aren't mutually exclusive. In particular, take a good hard look at what happened to BP and Transocean stock after the oil spill...
OS X is routinely first to lose in the "pwn to own" challenge, among others.
Really, you mean I, with almost zero programming skills could do it? Could my friend with zero programming skills do it?
Could either of you use CDE?
I mean, we are talking about CDE as a developer tool, right? If a developer can use that, it certainly is "easy enough" for them to make the data format portable.
apt-get or yum are not options in these environments...
Really? Why not?
Put another way: Rubygems can install to a home directory, and only requires Ruby itself to be in the path. Are you saying that the sandbox environment doesn't allow you to have reliable filesystem access or modify your environment variables? Because that's all it takes.
I realize apt-get or yum may require system-level access in their current configuration, but if they can be configured per-user, that's a limitation in apt-get or yum, not in the idea of a package manager.
firing up a VM each time you want to run an application is very heavyweight...
Not necessarily, especially when VMs can be cloned with COW memory.
the cluster may be composed of heterogenous set of machines with different versions of Linux.
Doesn't seem like an insoluble problem, either. If you're just going to statically link anyway, bundling system libraries doesn't seem like that big a stretch. A chroot jail would be a better solution (and I think BSD has a secure version of these), but you can fake that without root anyway.
The advantage of doing things this way is that you still get the advantages of dynamic linking (lower memory and disk usage for multiple programs installed, easier updates, etc). The only component missing is admin rights, and there's nothing special about admin rights that relates to any of these.
So, TD;DR: This looks like just another case where the correct solution was staring you in the face, but you went with the easy solution instead. That's not necessarily wrong -- you could actually make a much better case that it's too hard to write a proper package manager for this environment, and there's too small of a target audience to justify the effort, compared to a simpler solution which just Gets It Done.
But then, why is CDE a big enough deal to be Slashdotted? Presumably it took a significant amount of work...
Wait, what am I missing here...
...voluntarily waived the $75m statutory limit on monetary damages (contained in the Oil Pollution Act of 1990)...
Is there some other kind of damages they might've had? Becasue $20bn is way higher than $75m.
Outputting C is generally a bad idea, even if the rest of the language is a good idea. There's a reason that while technically every valid C program should be a valid C++ program, we still have separate C and C++ compilers, and C++ compilers don't output C.
But as another poster clarified, the performance gap is down to something like 20% between Java and C, and Java will give me things I don't think your choices can, like actual runtime reflection and optimizations. Also, a quick glance at Eiffel shows it has some sort of garbage collection, so is it really as fast as C?
At this point, unless it looks like Oracle is actually going to kill Java, I'll take a high-level JVM language over a high-level compiled-to-C language any day. JRuby is actually getting pretty insanely fast.
And yet, it manages to make Java syntax look elegant.
end Hello? You've gotta be kidding me!
At this point C# and the CLR has quite a bit less Microsoft lock in than Java and its Oracle lock in.
How so?
The licenses around C# and mono are really pretty good.
Better than the licenses around OpenJDK?
Mono is GPL2/LGPL2/MIT and gives the C# compiler and CLR.
It's also incomplete compared to mainstream .NET. OpenJDK has the full 15 years of research and optimizations piled into the JVM, and so far, we get pretty much the same JVM they do.
While the CLR may be theoretically better at handling other languages, the JVM has the benefit of multiple production-ready languages targeting it -- Java, Scala, Clojure, and JRuby come to mind, and I don't know of four production-ready CLR languages.
C# and CLI are ISO and ECMA standards with RAND licensing. That's about as good as it gets really.
It's close, but note that "RAND licensing" says nothing about licensing cost, particularly licensing cost with respect to patents. So that puts .NET in exactly the same place Java is -- either Microsoft or Oracle could suddenly decide to start charging for the patents required for either platform.
I challenge you to name something without patent risks.
It helps when a platform has been around for 15 years without its creators ever trying to patent anything about it -- though that doesn't apply to Java.
In more practical terms, the preferred platform for .NET development is Visual Studio. The preferred platform for Java development is Eclipse.
So please, exactly where can Oracle lock Java in that Microsoft cannot lock .NET in? The only thing .NET has in its favor is Mono, which isn't quite equivalent -- and Java has its own share of not-quite-equivalent things, too, like Kaffe and gcj.
And all this is academic unless there's a reason to consider .NET in the first place.
Here's the problem: Intelligent, detail-oriented people make mistakes.
after a few years of training can instinctively and deliberately avoid bugs both the subtle and the egregious...
If you can find a single programmer who actually does that, post their "flawless" code along with a sufficiently-motivating bounty and see how long it lasts. To be fair, you should have some way to verify the amount of time it took to produce this code.
In the real world...
Wait, back up.
higher-level languages like Java that do everything for you including tying your shoes for you...
Wow. You're actually claiming Java ties your shoes for you? Java, the only language I know of where == can't be counted on for equality (because Operator Overloading is Bad, mmkay?), where primitives are special cases, where null is a special case, where threading is still handled via the same primitives as in languages like C or C++... That language?
Seriously?
I'm just going to pretend you didn't say that, so I can pretend you had an intelligent point worth my time to respond.
So, in the real world, where Java is only moderately higher-level than C/C++, programmers can and do make mistakes occasionally. Even the best occasionally make stupid mistakes. Just off the top of my head:
Yeah, I know it's stupid, first-year mistakes. But think about the concepts you had to summon up to tell me why that's wrong. And of course, if I do it this way:
Now the caller is responsible for cleaning up after me. Sure, I can create a function that helps, if foo had a bunch of additional stuff that needs to be individually free'd or otherwise released, but they still need to call that. If they don't, I leak memory.
We can do that, or we can do C++, where we get gems like this:
Or if I decide to use the heap...
Even if you do manage to do it perfectly every time, you're still spending far more time -- even the sheer amount of typing saved not having to deal with this bullshit is significant. And you won't do it perfectly every time.
And when you screw it up in C/C++, you leak memory, segfault, corrupt yourself, or introduce a security vulnerability. When you screw it up in Java, so long as you're not using threads, about the worst you do is a null pointer exception.
Yes, you can leak memory, corrupt yourself, or be insecure in Java, but an entire class of bugs are now not possible. It is no longer possible to segfault, and it is no longer possible to introduce security vulnerabilities or leak memory through your use of pointers or references.
And you know what? For 99% of what I do with a computer, I'll gladly take a 50% performance hit for fewer bugs. In fact, I'll gladly take a 95% performance hit (and I routinely do) for even fewer bugs and (much) faster development. It's just more important for it to be reliable and maintainable than it is to satisfy someone's ego about how smart they are that they can use pointers.