IMO it is more of a "150.000 people I don't know dying" compared to "100 people from my country I might know personally dying". Our brain tends to ignore suffering that does not affect us directly to a certain degree because otherwise we would have a very difficult time getting anything done with all those people out there dying every day. Just a natural defense mechanism of our subconscious mind.
Judging by my experiences with users as a sysadmin training when switching from one version of windows to another would be necessary as well. The people having to decide wether they do this just don't train the people because inefficient work is not a hard number while training costs are. Training for Linux would at least be necessary only once because you don't have to change to a new Windowmanager (differences between Windows versions are like two different window managers) every few years.
He is probably like me and hates bloat (other people call it 'eye candy') or just does not use an external mouse and prefers keyboard input. GUIs tend to lose much of their efficiency without a fast, precise mouse (I could argue that there isn't much efficiency to begin with but that is besides the point here).
Normally it might not be fair to blame it on the JVM but when the JVM marketing people promise you "Write once, run anywhere" you can blame them if they can't deliver even if the feature is technically impossible to implement in the JVM.
I read the article a while ago. The point is that Java falls when Sun falls and Sun is not a company with the most stable business model out there. If that should happen all the Java Developers have a big problem since there is no free (and no real alternative to Sun) Java Implementation out there.
You will know who wasted the time when the Emacs or vi user happily uses his/her knowledge with the next language and you have to relearn a whole IDE all over again because your IDE of choice just works (or just works as well as you describe) with one language.
Not to mention that your editor still works for the hype-language of tomorrow when Java is gone. Except for Lisp, Fortran and a few other examples programming languages don't last as long as a programmer's work life.
Almost any modern programming language can get you platform independance if you just use Sockets, File-Access and "internal" logic. Server-side programming doesn't use many platform specific libraries.
The one area I always have to be careful about is setting up the AWT environment, but this is sysadmin stuff and does not effect the code.
What you call 'sysadmin stuff' is the thing that has to be repeated thousands of times (once on every computer your app is installed). If you had to spend 1 hour more with the code and 1 minute less per machine with 'sysadmin stuff' you would save lots of people lots of time although you might have to invest a little more.
Java isn't bad because of issues at compile-time on different platforms. It is bad because you simply can't trust a JRE to install automatically (newest version) and run a given Java JAR. Sure it runs if you specifically handcraft the environment on each computer but that doesn't save anyone important (developers are not important in this case) any time.
You forgot to mention the mode-change-key (or however vim users call it) that is for some strange reason the one key worse reachable than almost every other: Escape
It is irrelevant how easy or hard compiler development gets (as long as it is still possible). You simply don't make work easy for 1% of the people at the cost of making it hard for the other 99%.
I didn't RTFA but I recognize a programming language I don't want to work with directly and I know I hate UML-Editors and other Tools that move me further away from the actual code so I as a programmer don't want to work with XML as a programming language syntax, neither directly nor through some kind of IDE.
Slashdot Mirror
You know that on an 8 Mbit Line you could get to 2 GB in a bit more than half an hour (2000 seconds) and 5 GB in one hour and 23 minutes?
IMO it is more of a "150.000 people I don't know dying" compared to "100 people from my country I might know personally dying". Our brain tends to ignore suffering that does not affect us directly to a certain degree because otherwise we would have a very difficult time getting anything done with all those people out there dying every day. Just a natural defense mechanism of our subconscious mind.
And you think a website about web-standards gives you representative numbers about a non-standards-compliant browser like IE?
Do you have evidence terrorism would kill a significantly larger number of people if the US would not fight it's "War on Terrorism"?
As a rule of thumb it isn't "nosy and intrusive" if you don't injure or kill anyone.
We have always been at war with Eurasia...
Or he just doesn't consider Mac an option because of the extra computer he would have to buy to test wether it suits his needs
Judging by my experiences with users as a sysadmin training when switching from one version of windows to another would be necessary as well. The people having to decide wether they do this just don't train the people because inefficient work is not a hard number while training costs are. Training for Linux would at least be necessary only once because you don't have to change to a new Windowmanager (differences between Windows versions are like two different window managers) every few years.
He is probably like me and hates bloat (other people call it 'eye candy') or just does not use an external mouse and prefers keyboard input. GUIs tend to lose much of their efficiency without a fast, precise mouse (I could argue that there isn't much efficiency to begin with but that is besides the point here).
Normally it might not be fair to blame it on the JVM but when the JVM marketing people promise you "Write once, run anywhere" you can blame them if they can't deliver even if the feature is technically impossible to implement in the JVM.
I read the article a while ago. The point is that Java falls when Sun falls and Sun is not a company with the most stable business model out there. If that should happen all the Java Developers have a big problem since there is no free (and no real alternative to Sun) Java Implementation out there.
You will know who wasted the time when the Emacs or vi user happily uses his/her knowledge with the next language and you have to relearn a whole IDE all over again because your IDE of choice just works (or just works as well as you describe) with one language.
Not to mention that your editor still works for the hype-language of tomorrow when Java is gone. Except for Lisp, Fortran and a few other examples programming languages don't last as long as a programmer's work life.
Almost any modern programming language can get you platform independance if you just use Sockets, File-Access and "internal" logic. Server-side programming doesn't use many platform specific libraries.
Java isn't bad because of issues at compile-time on different platforms. It is bad because you simply can't trust a JRE to install automatically (newest version) and run a given Java JAR. Sure it runs if you specifically handcraft the environment on each computer but that doesn't save anyone important (developers are not important in this case) any time.
You forgot to mention the mode-change-key (or however vim users call it) that is for some strange reason the one key worse reachable than almost every other: Escape
With Linux you could (if you were really paranoid) do encrypt root http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=191052 and swap http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=279472
The could just use PostgreSQL and Ruby and have a LARP app.
Perhaps you might want to have a look at http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ which is a good ebook to learn Ruby.
Lets just say the Java Developers (the ones developing Java, not with Java) didn't take the time to do OO in Java The Right Way (TM).
So it seems as if we need some sort of test suite for xsl processors
It is irrelevant how easy or hard compiler development gets (as long as it is still possible). You simply don't make work easy for 1% of the people at the cost of making it hard for the other 99%.
I didn't RTFA but I recognize a programming language I don't want to work with directly and I know I hate UML-Editors and other Tools that move me further away from the actual code so I as a programmer don't want to work with XML as a programming language syntax, neither directly nor through some kind of IDE.