Take a step back. If Windows only runs on 30% of PC desktops, can Microsoft add value to its OS by introducing video/audio streaming capabilities? Is it legal then? Is it unfair then?
I think most people would say it's ok. So for the same business behavior, it is fair when you are small and it is unfair when you are big. I would say Microsoft is punished for being too successful, not for unfair practice.
I doubt the true difference is the attitude toward antitrust law between the US government and the EU.
Microsoft is a US company. Any government will eventually have to protect their own money makers. A profitable US company is a competition to similar European companies, hence the drastically different results.
In the end, each side is just trying protect their own companies. Although, incidentally, the EU decision also helps Microsoft's competitors in the US. Look at Munich's decision to switch from Windows to Linux. Why did they choose SUSE Linux over Red Hat Linux?
I agree that monopoly is a bad thing and I work in cable TV industry where there is true monopoly (duopoly to be exact) that really stifles innovation. If you have firsthand experience in this industry you will understand that Microsoft is not that bad at all.
Microsoft has published all APIs they think Windows developers should know. In my many years as a system programmer on Microsoft platforms, I had only one case where I used an undocumented feature and I was told about it for free by a Microsoft employee. I found Microsoft's published APIs quite comprehensive and sufficient. And my programming experience covers quite a wide spectrum: device drivers, networking, Web, system management, relational database, embedded software, realtime software, custom GUI, video/audio streaming, distributed application, client/server, mission critical application (24x7), scripting, etc. As a result, I have touched many aspects of the Microsoft platforms, in each case I am very satified with the documentation and developer support I received from Microsoft.
The Free Software movement has had it the other way round : it is based on making as much documentation as possible available to the public, and encouraging computer savviness. By making as many people as possible computer-literate, the Free Software movement has already brought a great benefit to the society. I can't count the number of friends I have helped installing Linux on their computers, giving them many more informations on how their computers work by the way. Even if this does not generate immediate revenue or profit, this is time and energy well spent, which implies spending less money on security -- computer-literate users make fewer dumb mistakes.
Microsoft's MSDN library, the most comprehensive library on everything Microsoft, is freely available to everyone on the Microsoft site. And there are so many public discussion groups that give away free information on every aspect of Windows development.
Before the burst of the hitech bubble, I used to interview a lot of candidates from both Windows and UNIX camps. Each time I asked them why they liked or hated each platform. The Windows guys claimed UNIX documentation was poor, the UNIX guys claimed Windows documentation was poor. In the end, I think it is because each group has indepth knowledge of only one environment. When they move to the other environment, they look for things that are native to their familiar environment. Many a time they are disappointed and think the thing they are looking for is not there. Actually it is there but in a different place. If you are an English speaker learning Chinese, there are many cases where a direct translation from Chinese to English becomes very awkward and you may think the Chinese language is not as expressive, but there are totally different ways of saying things in Chinese which achive the same effect.
That MS only generates buggy software is another myth among/.'ers. Many years ago, when everyone claimed NT was unstable and needed to be rebooted every other day, My desktop NT machine never had to be rebooted unless required by new software installation. But the Sun Solaris machine I used for GUI development did freeze multiple times. One reason is that I got used to the Windows' way of doing things, when I tried to do similar things on the Solaris machine, it was a new way for Solaris software hence crashed. A lot of UNIX people claimed Windows was unstable because they were trying to do things the UNIX way, a code path less travelled by MS people as it was not the designed way of doing things.
Microsoft write software that are useful to the users. How do you know certain features are useful while others are not? By hiring Einstein as chief software architect? No! Most of the time even users don't know exactly what they want until they have something to work with. So MS has to release new softwares with a lot of features they think might be useful. In the end, the features complained most by the users are the most useful and buggy, now MS can assemble its best people to get the job done thoroughly.
UNIX people took a different path. They design software that are most natural to the computer, hence friendly to the geeks. The geeks can make sure those features are bullet proof because they are the users. But the problem is average users are forced to learn the geek way of doing things.
MS tries to adapt to the user's way of doing things and sometimes makes mistakes while trying. The UNIX people built a stable system for themselves and want people to adapt to their way of doing things.
If you read my post, you should see that my conclusion is that most/.'ers will be negatively impacted, yourself included, and the benefit to the general population in the short term is clear, but cloudy in the long term.
In any case, it is ironic that any anti-trust law is enforced by the biggest monopoly ever, the GOVERNMENT. If you don't trust one dominating company, why do you trust the biggest dominating institution created by human beings? Is it just because this particular decision happens to align with your personal preference?
First, I don't think the 85% profit margin is a fair reason against Microsoft. Typically a software product's profit is recorded long after its development cost is incurred. Therefore the profit margin is calculated against manufacturing cost, distribution cost, marketing and sales cost, which is relatively low compared to hardware products. But the true cost of a software product, its development cost, is hidden under R&D cost of the entire company, and not counted toward the profit margin of the actual product in corporate financial reports.
Second, it would be naive to assume that when a business enters a stage of destructive price war, the prices will stop dropping after a company's profit margin drops from 80% to 40%. Look at AT&T, international long distance price has dropped from $2 a minute to less than 10c a minute in less than 5 years. Now it's cheaper to call China from US than to make local toll calls. I don't think it is healthy for the telecom industry to have this kind of competition. And I don't think the absurdly low price on long distance calls provides any incentive for future technology and service investment from long distance phone companies. And I do know a lot of good engineers laid off by Lucent as a result. Those guys have lost their career forever. Do you really think consumers can benefit from this situation in the long run?
Most slashdotters are fiercely anti-Microsoft so it's understandable they were elated by the EU news.
But is anti-trust law really good for most people in the long run? I'm no economist but I have first-hand experience about the side-effects of the anti-trust law.
I can say from my experience that if Microsoft were forced to its knees, most slashdotters would suffer in the long run.
When AT&T was a monopoly, scientists, engineers, and technicians had a great time in the telecom industry. There were a lot of talents working in the then lucrative telecom industry and a lot of innovations funded by AT&T's phone bill income, including UNIX (I am not saying AT&T is the sole creator of UNIX but a very significant contributor), the father of LINUX.
After AT&T was broken up, the phone call price dropped significantly, a big short term benefit to most consumers. But the drop in revenue forced out a lot of talents from the industry because there were no more money to hire them. I know a lot of talented engineers who spent years in the telecom industry but had to throw away all the domain expertise to switch career to wall street.
I think in a sense Microsoft's high profit margin is good news for LINUX vendors. That means they can charge a lower price than Windows and still make a decent profit to fund long term R&D. If Microsoft were forced to compete in a market where prices go down the toilet, like what happened to the telecom industry, then LINUX vendors will suffer as well. When the money flowing into the software industry dwindles, most slashdotters will lose their career just like what happened to the engineers in the telecom industry. Right now it is a business strategy to give some open source software away for free in the hope that customers will buy the enterprise version, by that time you will be forced to give away a lot more than even the open source people want. The entire software industry can no longer sustain all the R&D going on right now. Is that really a good thing for consumers in the long run?
Is it really a good idea for government to decide what is good for consumers? You have to think about the answer without bias. Just because the government sided with you this time doesn't mean it is a good thing for you in the long run.
This differentiation is pointless. The key point of argument is whether American jobs should be outsourced, be it blue collar or white collar. The fact that outsourcing happenned several times before doesn't make it good. It was bad for America then and it is bad for America now, regardless of the color of the collar.
One outcome of the massive distribution of free software is to force those older programmers, whose livelihood depends on developing software for financial payback, into those areas where years of experience count. The software must be too complex for those young programmers, and the software must be built on top of years of feedback from real-world paying customers, valuable information to which college professors and students do not have access. This kind of opportunities are typically in the hands of big corporations, like Microsoft. Smaller companies, which can only afford to developing less complex software and which haven't stayed in business long enough to garner sufficient user feedback, suffer the most from the competition of free software. In the end, it will be much harder for young commercial software companies to succeed, hence strenghening the stronghold of established corporations.
Worked for a CEO who spent most of his time bashing Microsoft, instead of running a business. He claimed to be a victim of Microsoft's evil business practices. He ridiculed other dot coms for being mere hypes. In the end, fake business, accounting scandal, CFO bailed right before the fallout (Fastow?!), COO fired and under FBI investigation (scapegoat?!), company collapsed, $400 million wasted, CEO ousted. The ex-CEO, $30 million dollor richer for running a company into ground, is still bashing Microsoft, at least this time he can't blame Microsoft for his business failure.
Lesson: a lot of anti-Microsoft heros are human scums.
Many tech managers will disagree with you. I wouldn't call them stupid as they command higher salary by doing less useful work. But you may argue they are not regular because they are pointy-headed...
Actually the third world can't afford anything made in the US or Europe. Some corrupt/ignorant officials and illegal businessmen can afford the western goods at tremendous cost to their own average fellow people. The problem is that most of the time they just don't know how to produce the things that they want. They would definitely welcome open source movement in the western world because not only they don't have to pay for the products, they also get to learn how to make the products themselves.
The price of everything in the entire world is based on how much the buyer is willing to pay, hence subjective in nature.
As far as software products are concerned, it's unfair to calculate the cost just based on the cost of packaging and distribution.
What about the original R&D cost? Most software companies can only recoup their R&D cost after the product is finished. Also most software companies must simultaneously support multiple new product ideas while in the end only a small percentage of them come to fruition. But it's unfair to only count the cost of those successful projects.
Another problem is memory. Our company's product allocates/frees memory all the time (for good reasons). Simply replacing the standard C runtime heap library by a special heap library has improved performance by 300%. That means an one hour operation gets cut down to 20 minutes, a very meanful improvement for end users. Also thread specific heaps make 10 times difference in terms of performance when concurrent operations are running simultaneously. May be I am ignorant but as far as I know, Java's GC is not cut for this kind of requirements.
What I really meant were true C++/Java experts. It is easier to write robust code in Java than in C++, hence less people capable of writing high-quality code in C++. But there are true C++ experts who can natually write C++ code devoid of most typical C++ problems such as memory leak, memory corruption, etc. For them, the development time difference between C++ and Java for non-trivial projects are insignificant.
The idea is to rewrite Linux source code in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This way those countries no longer need to depend on American and European programmers.
Although I don't have the slightest idea about what you are talking about, I do think you have a shot at joining the academians.
Good luck with your Ph.D.
Speed and memory usage do matter, even today.
Any computer science student knows that many important computer algorithms are designed to deal with problems that grow in difficulty exponentially. For problems that grow in difficulty expontionially and cannot be further reduced, even today's hardware is not enough to handle. In those cases, the performance boost obtained by C++ is a real differentiator. Since there aren't many such problems, the current small pool of experienced C++ programmer are enough to work on such software. And for truly experienced C++ programmers, Java doesn't offer that much value. For example, truly exceptional programmers don't produce memory leaks.
I will choose Java for most mundane tasks because I can type less code. Typing less code doesn't automatically mean less development time. How much development time is actually spent on typing? Since the code is mostly bug free to begin with, the other Java benefits don't apply either. But to claim that Java alone is good enough to replace C++ tells people that the claimer hasn't seen enough software problems yet.
Otherwise, the team could waste time checking for dangling pointers when instead it could be doing other things, like finishing up other projects.
There is a software called CodeGlow that will find dangling pointers in C/C++ programs without requiring recompilation. I used it and was amazed by the result.
I would say CodeGlow has eliminated most real life dangling pointer problems at very low cost.
Someone should do a study on the time taken to design, implement and debug a resonably complex chunk of code under C++ and Java. I'm pretty sure that the result would show the huge advanatage of Java over C++.
The differences between the two programming languages are not that big to give Java any meaningful lead over C++. C++ is harder to learn, hence a much smaller programmer base. But once you have mastered it, you can produce results at speeds on par with Java for many real life applications.
The major difference is the libraries used by each programming language, not the languages themselves. Java has standard libraries for a lot of common tasks that all Java programmers use. But for C++ programmers need to learn different libraries even from the same vendor like Microsoft. Most C++ programmers tend to have their own common task libraries. Again if you have already mastered all necessary library APIs, the development time should be comparable for both programming languages for a lot of real life projects.
I am not anti any programming language. But Java does have its limitations just like every other programming language. It all depends on what the underlying application needs to deliver.
I want to blast a popular myth among Americans:
Capitalism works, protectionism doesn't.
Many Americans believe that developed countries became so wealthy because they adopted free market economic policies while the poorer countries didn't. Actually, for a long period of time, the free market economy was confined to a few wealthy countries and their small allies, the vast majority of the poorer world were not allowed to join the game for various reasons. For example, major capitalist countries imposed long-term economical and technological sanctions on communist countries until the 90's.
I would argue that this extended isolation from free competition from countries like Russia and China protected average Americans and generated the current high living standard for most Americans.
In addition to long term sanctions on communist countries. American immigration policies only allowed large scale immigration from European countries until the 60's. This isolation policy protected average Americans from competition from most populous countries like India and China. Most IT companies in India were set up by returning Indian immigrants to America. Without the loosening of immigration policy in late 60's, today's Indian IT boom is impossible.
Both examples proved that when America was on its way to the most wealthy and powerful country in the world, it was largely protected from free competition from Soviet Union, China, and India. True capitalism was adopted only in countries which were already wealthy at the time plus a bunch of small countries. With this limited capitalism, America already lost a lot of jobs to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. But those countries were too small to cause widespread troubles to average Americans.
When America was the manufacture center of the world, Chinese and Indian people were already earning extremely low salaries and eager to work only if the Americans gave them the opportunities. But America imposed sanctions on China for almost thirty years and didn't open the door of large-scale immigration for Indians until late 60's.
Hong Kong people like to brag about their prosperity as a result of free capitalism. But before America established formal relationship with China in the 70's, due to American sanction on China, 60% of entire China's import/export must go through Hong Kong. With that kind of business of an entire country passing through one city, no wonder Hong Kong became so prosperous. In a sense, America's isolation of China led to Hong Kong's great economic boom.
For average Americans who think that open competition, instead of protectionism, was the main reason for their good life today, they need to know there are other factors they don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a step back. If Windows only runs on 30% of PC desktops, can Microsoft add value to its OS by introducing video/audio streaming capabilities? Is it legal then? Is it unfair then?
I think most people would say it's ok. So for the same business behavior, it is fair when you are small and it is unfair when you are big. I would say Microsoft is punished for being too successful, not for unfair practice.
I doubt the true difference is the attitude toward antitrust law between the US government and the EU.
Microsoft is a US company. Any government will eventually have to protect their own money makers. A profitable US company is a competition to similar European companies, hence the drastically different results.
In the end, each side is just trying protect their own companies. Although, incidentally, the EU decision also helps Microsoft's competitors in the US. Look at Munich's decision to switch from Windows to Linux. Why did they choose SUSE Linux over Red Hat Linux?
I agree that monopoly is a bad thing and I work in cable TV industry where there is true monopoly (duopoly to be exact) that really stifles innovation. If you have firsthand experience in this industry you will understand that Microsoft is not that bad at all.
Microsoft has published all APIs they think Windows developers should know. In my many years as a system programmer on Microsoft platforms, I had only one case where I used an undocumented feature and I was told about it for free by a Microsoft employee. I found Microsoft's published APIs quite comprehensive and sufficient. And my programming experience covers quite a wide spectrum: device drivers, networking, Web, system management, relational database, embedded software, realtime software, custom GUI, video/audio streaming, distributed application, client/server, mission critical application (24x7), scripting, etc. As a result, I have touched many aspects of the Microsoft platforms, in each case I am very satified with the documentation and developer support I received from Microsoft.
The Free Software movement has had it the other way round : it is based on making as much documentation as possible available to the public, and encouraging computer savviness. By making as many people as possible computer-literate, the Free Software movement has already brought a great benefit to the society. I can't count the number of friends I have helped installing Linux on their computers, giving them many more informations on how their computers work by the way. Even if this does not generate immediate revenue or profit, this is time and energy well spent, which implies spending less money on security -- computer-literate users make fewer dumb mistakes.
Microsoft's MSDN library, the most comprehensive library on everything Microsoft, is freely available to everyone on the Microsoft site. And there are so many public discussion groups that give away free information on every aspect of Windows development.
Before the burst of the hitech bubble, I used to interview a lot of candidates from both Windows and UNIX camps. Each time I asked them why they liked or hated each platform. The Windows guys claimed UNIX documentation was poor, the UNIX guys claimed Windows documentation was poor. In the end, I think it is because each group has indepth knowledge of only one environment. When they move to the other environment, they look for things that are native to their familiar environment. Many a time they are disappointed and think the thing they are looking for is not there. Actually it is there but in a different place. If you are an English speaker learning Chinese, there are many cases where a direct translation from Chinese to English becomes very awkward and you may think the Chinese language is not as expressive, but there are totally different ways of saying things in Chinese which achive the same effect.
That MS only generates buggy software is another myth among /.'ers. Many years ago, when everyone claimed NT was unstable and needed to be rebooted every other day, My desktop NT machine never had to be rebooted unless required by new software installation. But the Sun Solaris machine I used for GUI development did freeze multiple times. One reason is that I got used to the Windows' way of doing things, when I tried to do similar things on the Solaris machine, it was a new way for Solaris software hence crashed. A lot of UNIX people claimed Windows was unstable because they were trying to do things the UNIX way, a code path less travelled by MS people as it was not the designed way of doing things.
Microsoft write software that are useful to the users. How do you know certain features are useful while others are not? By hiring Einstein as chief software architect? No! Most of the time even users don't know exactly what they want until they have something to work with. So MS has to release new softwares with a lot of features they think might be useful. In the end, the features complained most by the users are the most useful and buggy, now MS can assemble its best people to get the job done thoroughly.
UNIX people took a different path. They design software that are most natural to the computer, hence friendly to the geeks. The geeks can make sure those features are bullet proof because they are the users. But the problem is average users are forced to learn the geek way of doing things.
MS tries to adapt to the user's way of doing things and sometimes makes mistakes while trying. The UNIX people built a stable system for themselves and want people to adapt to their way of doing things.
If you read my post, you should see that my conclusion is that most /.'ers will be negatively impacted, yourself included, and the benefit to the general population in the short term is clear, but cloudy in the long term.
In any case, it is ironic that any anti-trust law is enforced by the biggest monopoly ever, the GOVERNMENT. If you don't trust one dominating company, why do you trust the biggest dominating institution created by human beings? Is it just because this particular decision happens to align with your personal preference?
First, I don't think the 85% profit margin is a fair reason against Microsoft. Typically a software product's profit is recorded long after its development cost is incurred. Therefore the profit margin is calculated against manufacturing cost, distribution cost, marketing and sales cost, which is relatively low compared to hardware products. But the true cost of a software product, its development cost, is hidden under R&D cost of the entire company, and not counted toward the profit margin of the actual product in corporate financial reports.
Second, it would be naive to assume that when a business enters a stage of destructive price war, the prices will stop dropping after a company's profit margin drops from 80% to 40%. Look at AT&T, international long distance price has dropped from $2 a minute to less than 10c a minute in less than 5 years. Now it's cheaper to call China from US than to make local toll calls. I don't think it is healthy for the telecom industry to have this kind of competition. And I don't think the absurdly low price on long distance calls provides any incentive for future technology and service investment from long distance phone companies. And I do know a lot of good engineers laid off by Lucent as a result. Those guys have lost their career forever. Do you really think consumers can benefit from this situation in the long run?
Most slashdotters are fiercely anti-Microsoft so it's understandable they were elated by the EU news.
But is anti-trust law really good for most people in the long run? I'm no economist but I have first-hand experience about the side-effects of the anti-trust law.
I can say from my experience that if Microsoft were forced to its knees, most slashdotters would suffer in the long run.
When AT&T was a monopoly, scientists, engineers, and technicians had a great time in the telecom industry. There were a lot of talents working in the then lucrative telecom industry and a lot of innovations funded by AT&T's phone bill income, including UNIX (I am not saying AT&T is the sole creator of UNIX but a very significant contributor), the father of LINUX.
After AT&T was broken up, the phone call price dropped significantly, a big short term benefit to most consumers. But the drop in revenue forced out a lot of talents from the industry because there were no more money to hire them. I know a lot of talented engineers who spent years in the telecom industry but had to throw away all the domain expertise to switch career to wall street.
I think in a sense Microsoft's high profit margin is good news for LINUX vendors. That means they can charge a lower price than Windows and still make a decent profit to fund long term R&D. If Microsoft were forced to compete in a market where prices go down the toilet, like what happened to the telecom industry, then LINUX vendors will suffer as well. When the money flowing into the software industry dwindles, most slashdotters will lose their career just like what happened to the engineers in the telecom industry. Right now it is a business strategy to give some open source software away for free in the hope that customers will buy the enterprise version, by that time you will be forced to give away a lot more than even the open source people want. The entire software industry can no longer sustain all the R&D going on right now. Is that really a good thing for consumers in the long run?
Is it really a good idea for government to decide what is good for consumers? You have to think about the answer without bias. Just because the government sided with you this time doesn't mean it is a good thing for you in the long run.
The truly huge difference is that IBM's "evil" money making plan happens to converge with your religious belief while Microsoft's doesn't.
This differentiation is pointless. The key point of argument is whether American jobs should be outsourced, be it blue collar or white collar. The fact that outsourcing happenned several times before doesn't make it good. It was bad for America then and it is bad for America now, regardless of the color of the collar.
One outcome of the massive distribution of free software is to force those older programmers, whose livelihood depends on developing software for financial payback, into those areas where years of experience count. The software must be too complex for those young programmers, and the software must be built on top of years of feedback from real-world paying customers, valuable information to which college professors and students do not have access. This kind of opportunities are typically in the hands of big corporations, like Microsoft. Smaller companies, which can only afford to developing less complex software and which haven't stayed in business long enough to garner sufficient user feedback, suffer the most from the competition of free software. In the end, it will be much harder for young commercial software companies to succeed, hence strenghening the stronghold of established corporations.
Worked for a CEO who spent most of his time bashing Microsoft, instead of running a business. He claimed to be a victim of Microsoft's evil business practices. He ridiculed other dot coms for being mere hypes. In the end, fake business, accounting scandal, CFO bailed right before the fallout (Fastow?!), COO fired and under FBI investigation (scapegoat?!), company collapsed, $400 million wasted, CEO ousted. The ex-CEO, $30 million dollor richer for running a company into ground, is still bashing Microsoft, at least this time he can't blame Microsoft for his business failure. Lesson: a lot of anti-Microsoft heros are human scums.
Many tech managers will disagree with you. I wouldn't call them stupid as they command higher salary by doing less useful work. But you may argue they are not regular because they are pointy-headed...
I've gone through hundreds of messages but yet to see one guy claiming to have actually seen the code.
Actually the third world can't afford anything made in the US or Europe. Some corrupt/ignorant officials and illegal businessmen can afford the western goods at tremendous cost to their own average fellow people. The problem is that most of the time they just don't know how to produce the things that they want. They would definitely welcome open source movement in the western world because not only they don't have to pay for the products, they also get to learn how to make the products themselves.
The price of everything in the entire world is based on how much the buyer is willing to pay, hence subjective in nature.
As far as software products are concerned, it's unfair to calculate the cost just based on the cost of packaging and distribution.
What about the original R&D cost? Most software companies can only recoup their R&D cost after the product is finished. Also most software companies must simultaneously support multiple new product ideas while in the end only a small percentage of them come to fruition. But it's unfair to only count the cost of those successful projects.
Another problem is memory. Our company's product allocates/frees memory all the time (for good reasons). Simply replacing the standard C runtime heap library by a special heap library has improved performance by 300%. That means an one hour operation gets cut down to 20 minutes, a very meanful improvement for end users. Also thread specific heaps make 10 times difference in terms of performance when concurrent operations are running simultaneously. May be I am ignorant but as far as I know, Java's GC is not cut for this kind of requirements.
What I really meant were true C++/Java experts. It is easier to write robust code in Java than in C++, hence less people capable of writing high-quality code in C++. But there are true C++ experts who can natually write C++ code devoid of most typical C++ problems such as memory leak, memory corruption, etc. For them, the development time difference between C++ and Java for non-trivial projects are insignificant.
The idea is to rewrite Linux source code in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This way those countries no longer need to depend on American and European programmers.
Although I don't have the slightest idea about what you are talking about, I do think you have a shot at joining the academians.
Good luck with your Ph.D.
Speed and memory usage do matter, even today.
Any computer science student knows that many important computer algorithms are designed to deal with problems that grow in difficulty exponentially. For problems that grow in difficulty expontionially and cannot be further reduced, even today's hardware is not enough to handle. In those cases, the performance boost obtained by C++ is a real differentiator. Since there aren't many such problems, the current small pool of experienced C++ programmer are enough to work on such software. And for truly experienced C++ programmers, Java doesn't offer that much value. For example, truly exceptional programmers don't produce memory leaks.
I will choose Java for most mundane tasks because I can type less code. Typing less code doesn't automatically mean less development time. How much development time is actually spent on typing? Since the code is mostly bug free to begin with, the other Java benefits don't apply either. But to claim that Java alone is good enough to replace C++ tells people that the claimer hasn't seen enough software problems yet.
Sorry it should be GlowCode.
Otherwise, the team could waste time checking for dangling pointers when instead it could be doing other things, like finishing up other projects.
There is a software called CodeGlow that will find dangling pointers in C/C++ programs without requiring recompilation. I used it and was amazed by the result.
I would say CodeGlow has eliminated most real life dangling pointer problems at very low cost.
Someone should do a study on the time taken to design, implement and debug a resonably complex chunk of code under C++ and Java. I'm pretty sure that the result would show the huge advanatage of Java over C++.
The differences between the two programming languages are not that big to give Java any meaningful lead over C++. C++ is harder to learn, hence a much smaller programmer base. But once you have mastered it, you can produce results at speeds on par with Java for many real life applications.
The major difference is the libraries used by each programming language, not the languages themselves. Java has standard libraries for a lot of common tasks that all Java programmers use. But for C++ programmers need to learn different libraries even from the same vendor like Microsoft. Most C++ programmers tend to have their own common task libraries. Again if you have already mastered all necessary library APIs, the development time should be comparable for both programming languages for a lot of real life projects.
All that matters to anti-Java zealots is speed.
Memory usage is another very important issue.
I am not anti any programming language. But Java does have its limitations just like every other programming language. It all depends on what the underlying application needs to deliver.
I want to blast a popular myth among Americans:
Capitalism works, protectionism doesn't.
Many Americans believe that developed countries became so wealthy because they adopted free market economic policies while the poorer countries didn't. Actually, for a long period of time, the free market economy was confined to a few wealthy countries and their small allies, the vast majority of the poorer world were not allowed to join the game for various reasons. For example, major capitalist countries imposed long-term economical and technological sanctions on communist countries until the 90's.
I would argue that this extended isolation from free competition from countries like Russia and China protected average Americans and generated the current high living standard for most Americans.
In addition to long term sanctions on communist countries. American immigration policies only allowed large scale immigration from European countries until the 60's. This isolation policy protected average Americans from competition from most populous countries like India and China. Most IT companies in India were set up by returning Indian immigrants to America. Without the loosening of immigration policy in late 60's, today's Indian IT boom is impossible.
Both examples proved that when America was on its way to the most wealthy and powerful country in the world, it was largely protected from free competition from Soviet Union, China, and India. True capitalism was adopted only in countries which were already wealthy at the time plus a bunch of small countries. With this limited capitalism, America already lost a lot of jobs to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. But those countries were too small to cause widespread troubles to average Americans.
When America was the manufacture center of the world, Chinese and Indian people were already earning extremely low salaries and eager to work only if the Americans gave them the opportunities. But America imposed sanctions on China for almost thirty years and didn't open the door of large-scale immigration for Indians until late 60's.
Hong Kong people like to brag about their prosperity as a result of free capitalism. But before America established formal relationship with China in the 70's, due to American sanction on China, 60% of entire China's import/export must go through Hong Kong. With that kind of business of an entire country passing through one city, no wonder Hong Kong became so prosperous. In a sense, America's isolation of China led to Hong Kong's great economic boom.
For average Americans who think that open competition, instead of protectionism, was the main reason for their good life today, they need to know there are other factors they don't know.