Just as a point of information, Java did essentially fork. That is why you have J2ME.
But still no usable Java applet platform.
No this forking was not an emergent phenomena as you'd see in pure Open Source, it was preplanned, but I can't say I view that as a negative thing.
I view it as a negative thing because the planning was based on Sun's proprietary interests, not on the needs of Java developers and users. That's why you get forks for J2ME (=mobile devices) and J2EE (=server-side stuff), both of which are niche markets that happen to be of commercial interest to Sun. And J2SE isn't going anywhere, except as a platform for alternative middleware implementations.
Anyone ever tried to accurately count a stack of ten thousand pieces of paper, dividing them into two separate piles in the process?
Yes, I have. And there are statistical and procedural techniques for dealing with that and achieving accurate results. I don't know whether the recounts are using it (I doubt it: given that they are screwing up on the voting machines, why should they be any more competent on the recounts?), but the techniques exist and are used daily in industry.
The problem is that we don't know which party these doubled votes went for (or which party lost votes would have gone for). So it's all depends on your bias
How does a 261 vote Republican lead narrowing to a 19 vote Republican lead "depend on my bias"?
Since the media tends to be liberally biased (really, it's true)
Bullshit. Studies have disproven that claim time and again.
Also, MSProject is a reasonable product. It does get the job done. Even though it comes from the Evil Empire -it still is a decent tool.
I don't think MSProject (or its clones) gets the job done: it forces you to represent far too much detail and complexity far too early, and it will discourage you from exploring alternatives or making necessary changes.
I think good project planning, like good design in general, is still best accomplished with paper, pencils, index cards, and tape.
Again, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I wasn't arguing the relative merits of IE and FF, or which browser is the best in existence.
I was arguing that taking product X and turning it into open source project Y has a good chance of making it leaner, less bloated, and generally better quality. Do you agree that Firefox is a leaner, less bloated, and higher quality product than the last commercial Netscape release? Well, if so, then we aren't disagreeing on anything.
I remember the comments veering from "neural net laser-guided search functionality would be pretty cool" to "for the love of Stallman, please don't bloat our browser!" I think the thing that's been so significant about Linux is that it's been able to generally avoid this problem
I don't see "the problem". Have any of those been incorporated into FF? No. That's because those discussions are useful and productive. There are hundreds of add-ons, but only the ones that work well enough, have been tested enough in the real world, and are desired by enough users actually make it into the distribution. Sun and the JCP, on the other hand, evidently have little self-control.
I think that this is also part of what Sun fears about letting go of Java.
"Fear" implies that there is some unrealized horrible consequence. But this consequence is already realized: Java is already bloated because Sun is trying to put in every buzz-word compliant checklist item they can. If Sun Java were to become open source, the first thing people would do is remove most of the crud that has accumulated over the years. And you can be certain that such a lean Java distribution would be a lot more popular than the mess Sun is shipping.
What Sun "fears about letting go of Java" is that it's the only piece of software they control that is even vaguely still relevant to the computer industry. But they are killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs by not letting it go free.
now having two people who rarely venture outdoors except under duress
Easy: get them wireless access. The Danger Hiptop might work.
And, don't worry, once they discover real sex, they will venture outside again.
Do you ban them from using MSN?
Sounds like a good idea. They should be using Jabber.
Do you limit the number of hours they can be online?"
Oops, darn, what a shame, Windows crashed again. Kids, it will take me a few hours to reinstall. Sooner or later, they'll catch on and just install Linux for you, but at least that's educational.
Many Slashdot readers must have confronted this situation; how have you dealt with it, and what were the outcomes of what you did?
Yeah, I know, being a Slashdot reader myself, my parents have been trying to get me away from the computer as well, but with little success so far:-)
Isn't this one of MS's salvos against Linux? That the TCO of Linux is higher because the techs command more money? Be careful of what you wish for - you might just get it.
How much you pay for tech support depends on both the cost and how much you need. Linux support may cost more, but you need a lot less of it.
As for Firefox, this basically boils down to a religious argument - you pretty much ignored the research showing that IE handles broken code better.
I was making an analogy between a bloated, feature-laden commercial product (which is what Netscape started out as) and what open source has been able to transform it into, Firefox. Even if IE were a better browser than Firefox, that would have no relevance to that analogy. (Of course, Firefox's stricter handling of "broken code" is deliberate.)
As for Java, I would be happy to see an effort - whether open or not - to get a thin client working
Well, that's my point: so would I. But Sun evidently isn't doing it themselves, and their control over Java allows them to keep others from doing it ("no subsetting"), so it isn't going to happen.
But sandboxing is not a function of the language - it is solely a function of the runtime.
Java isn't a language, it's a platform: it's the language, the entire set of official APIs, and the runtime. Sun says so (in fact, they insist on it), that's what they require compliance for, and they own the trademark.
(Note that, disturbingly, this bug in Sun's implementation shows that, not only is their implementation buggy, but their extensive certification process didn't catch the bug either.)
The Java sandbox has had how many security exploits discovered in the eight or nine years it's been around? Perhaps there have been a couple, but I can't remember any.
The Java sandbox has had lots of security exploits over the years. I suspect the main reason people stopped discovering them is because Sun pretty much destroyed Java for applet use.
and you're complaining because...? Oh right, because Java isn't open source.
Indirectly, yes. Sun has lost its focus on a thin client platform and instead gone for the money--server side development. Open source could have forked Java as an applet platform before it got bloated and complex and focused on making it high quality for that purpose.
The major reason we don't see more is *not* because it's so much more robust
Oh, you are so wrong. The major reason Firefox works well is because the community took the bloated commercially-derived software (Mozilla) and pruned it down to its essentials (Firefox). It is about time that the same happened with Java.
Browsers aren't responsible for sandboxing plugins--in fact, they couldn't do it if they wanted to. Sandboxing is exclusively a function of the language and its runtime, in this case Java. If Sun's Java plugin allows the execution of dangerous code by untrusted code, it is Sun's fault. Note also that this is not the first time that this has happened.
Fortunately, the solution is simple: just turn off Java applets in your browser. These days, you won't be missing anything important on the web by doing so.
The "sandbox" that cordons off Java applets from the rest of the system has typically worked well.
When Java first came out, people found lots of security problems with its sandbox; there were both fundamental flaws in Java's type system and problems in Sun's implementation. That aspect of Java was subject to intense scrutiny back then because Sun had positioned Java as a new way of delivering client applications, which depended critically on sandboxing. The vision was that Java would replace heavy desktop apps.
These days, it doesn't matter much anymore: Java has failed to achieve its goals on the client; you can browse perfectly fine with applets disabled and never even notice. And for Java's current server side uses, sandboxing isn't really that important. So, people stopped finding flaws in Java's sandbox because they stopped looking--it just doesn't matter to anyone anymore.
I think Java's original vision of a thin client platform for high-quality applications delivered through the Internet is still relevant, but Java won't be able to fulfill it anymore: it has become too bloated and too complex. More likely, that niche will be filled by an updated version of Flash (yuck), XUL, or, perhaps, something entirely new.
tells me "what's that K icon where START should be", I call bullcrap on any point-and-click Linux.
You mean the "Start" button that is, among other things, used for shutting down Windows? Yes, that's one of the features that usability alone dictates Linux shouldn't emulate.
The reason I should say this is because my mom is extremely typical. Things "power users" take for granted (or, rather, don't even think about for one second) are very puzzling to many average computer users.
Yes, which is why Linux should copy Windows's usability problems. Linux has to do better, and that breaks compatibility. Linux has to appeal to the next generation of users, both here and abroad, not to the old Windows and Macintosh fogeys, who keep complaining and will never be really satisfied with anything other than the platform they grew up on anyway.
If your mother refuses to use Linux because she can't deal that the "Start" menu has a "K" on it, that's her problem. Most people are smart enough to figure it out that a menu that looks the same and is in the same place roughly does the same thing even if it has a K on it (the menu down there is already a concession; I think the Gnome default is preferable and clearer anyway). And most people also find savings of thousands of dollars in software enough of a motivation to get off their lazy butts and bother engaging their brain for a few minutes. But, ultimately, what your mother considers a "good UI" after years of having her mind warped by Microsoft software simply doesn't matter because the choices she makes don't matter to the long term future of the Linux desktop.
(1) You can get a sluggish end-of-life under-$1000 Macintosh with almost no software on it, shell out about $100/year to keep it up to date (not to mention the cost of all the other software upgrades), and then fiddle with CDs and downloads to install the latest versions of everything, or
(2) You can get a blazing under-$1000 Linux system that leaves the Macintosh in the dust, lets you pick the user interface and theme you like, comes with thousands of applications preinstalled, and comes with lifetime, automatic free upgrades.
No, it isn't. I'm sorry that you evidently don't understand why, but this is not the forum to discuss why there is a large number of people that prefer the Linux UI to the Macintosh UI. Given the immense amount of advocacy from people like you, you can rest assured that they are more than aware of the alternative and have made their choice deliberately.
Guys, this is the Mozilla section. I already deleted the Apple section from my frontpage because I'm tired of the ceaseless Apple marketing and rewriting of history by Apple fans. Making incorrect claims that open source projects are copying features from Apple, when the opposite is the case, are insulting and just make Apple look bad.
"Open" means that you can implement the spec as you like, and the JVM spec is not open (and neither are the language or the libraries): read the license linked to at the bottom of the spec that you yourself point to. Also read Stallman's take on this if you don't believe me.
Yes, I agree, they don't have a big "ECMA" or "ISO" badge, but well... since when were those worth a penny.
They guarantee that Microsoft can't play the kinds of legal games that Sun has been playing with the Java specification.
C++ has been ISO certified for years or decades,
Yes, and that has achieved exactly what it should: creating a choice of a large variety of compilers from many different vendors.
OK... let's say this: I like Javas design, you like C# design; it's futile to discuss taste issues, so I won't.
That's like saying that the difference betwee a dump truck and a school bus is a question of "taste". In fact, it's a difference in functionality, and a well-understood one at that. See here for a more extensive technical discussion of what Java is lacking if you don't believe me (the people there seem to have pretty much given up on Sun and Java, too).
It's unfortunate that Pascal gave type safety such a bad name: the language, as it was usually used for teaching, had such limited functionality and imposed such a straight-jacket on people that several generations of programmers thought type-safety made languages useless and that they needed to use something as unsafe as C to get any work done.
Yet, commercial implementations of Pascal were in pretty common use, had all the low-level facilities of C, and yet gave programmers a decent amount of type safety and runtime error checking. In fact, a lot of the early Macintosh software was written in ObjectPascal, and TurboPascal was very popular and very useful on the PC. Even the Apple II ran a pretty good Pascal development environment (in 64k of memory), with a decent screen oriented editor, menu bars, and an integrated compile/edit/run/debug system. Pascal syntax also was quite a bit less error prone than C/C++'s. Having pointer dereferencing be a postfix operator alone is just so much more sensible.
Perhaps much more interesting than Pascal, historically, are Algol-60, Simula-67, and Algol-68, which are related to it; Pascal was probably never intended to compete with them, but rather serve as an educational introduction to them and their successors. Around the same time, many fundamental ideas in programming languages were developed and implemented, including APL, Lisp 1.5, Snobol, PL/I, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Window systems, GUI toolkits, constraint-based programming, MVC, and other concepts we take for granted today followed shortly thereafter.
My point? You complained about Sun (claiming that Sun claims to have GC options, but that they have implementation problems).
I didn't "complain" about Sun. I simply pointed out that they started out with a pretty poor implementation and that it has taken them a long time to bring it to maturity. I also pointed out that C# is competitive with Sun's much older Java implementations now in terms of performance.
And what would the advantage of that be? Having only one way of accessing data is simpler. Having to decide (in C or C++) between Stack or Heap allocation takes up time and the difference can introduce subtle bugs.
The advantage would be that commonly used data types like complex numbers and 3D vectors behave the way programmers expect them to. If that confuses you, you are right, C# isn't the language for you.
Er... so... Suns implementation, dynamic compilers, GC options were known, when.NET came out. Why does a huge company with huge research resources create such a poor implementation of the CLR?
Gosh, did you even bother to look at the story? Quite uncharacteristically, Microsoft did just about everything right with C#/CLR. Their own implementations are excellent. And, in contrast to Java, the C#/CLR standard is open and there are good open source implementations with extensive libraries. And C# is simply a better designed language than Java. It is also functionally a strict superset, which means that people will likely gradually migrate to CLR (either with a Java/CLR compiler or directly to C#) and never look back.
Such approaches give you only limited protection: if you don't trust the systems you plug into, you may still be subject to key logging, screen recording and other attack.
HotSpot, the Sun JVM, has had 8 byte object headers for years (at least since version 1.3).
So it still has 8 byte object headers, after all these years, instead of 4 bytes or less. (I qualified my statement only because I thought Sun might have fixed this in 1.5, but apparently not.)
NET still only [...] Mono actually uses the Boehm GC,
Yes, the Sun Java implementation is more mature than.NET and Mono, we know that. What's your point?
Sun has made the right decision to keep the reference-type-only system
Right for their slice of the market perhaps. Wrong for general purpose computing. Give it another decade, and most Java compilers will probably target the CLR.
There's research for having more packed object headers, or for ways to even get rid of them (allocation in special pools,...). All of this can be implemented without adding special semantics, and this are areas for future JVMs.
The semantics of value classes are supposed to be different. Giving everything reference semantics would be the wrong thing to do even if the compiler managed to perform every possible optimization.
Sure... it's not available today, but 10 years back, Java was a simple bytecode interpreter with a mark-sweep GC.
There was no reason to create such a poor implementation back then; generational GCs, incremental GCs, dynamic compilation, and most of the other features used in Sun's JDK were already well-known at the time. Sun simply didn't use them.
There is Sun's feature list, and then there is actual implementation and performance, and that hasn't been all that impressive. Until fairly recently, Sun Java still had 12 byte object headers (I think they are still 8 bytes now, but I frankly just don't care anymore).
The only thing that remains is stuff like Escape Analysis
Yes, important stuff like that, stuff that other systems have had for many years. And other systems also have planned ahead in their language semantics to make this sort of thing work well, rather than taking a half-baked design and sticking with it forever.
which supposedly will make it into the next Java version
Are you really sure there's no-one in Russia contributing to (F)OSS?
There are plenty of people in Russia contributing to FOSS. What I'm saying is that those people who complain about Western software prices and feel like they need to pirate software should stop complaining and use (and even contribute to) FOSS instead. Piracy isn't the answer to outrageous software prices, using something cheaper (or free) is. And that's true for the US as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as a point of information, Java did essentially fork. That is why you have J2ME.
But still no usable Java applet platform.
No this forking was not an emergent phenomena as you'd see in pure Open Source, it was preplanned, but I can't say I view that as a negative thing.
I view it as a negative thing because the planning was based on Sun's proprietary interests, not on the needs of Java developers and users. That's why you get forks for J2ME (=mobile devices) and J2EE (=server-side stuff), both of which are niche markets that happen to be of commercial interest to Sun. And J2SE isn't going anywhere, except as a platform for alternative middleware implementations.
Anyone ever tried to accurately count a stack of ten thousand pieces of paper, dividing them into two separate piles in the process?
Yes, I have. And there are statistical and procedural techniques for dealing with that and achieving accurate results. I don't know whether the recounts are using it (I doubt it: given that they are screwing up on the voting machines, why should they be any more competent on the recounts?), but the techniques exist and are used daily in industry.
The problem is that we don't know which party these doubled votes went for (or which party lost votes would have gone for). So it's all depends on your bias
How does a 261 vote Republican lead narrowing to a 19 vote Republican lead "depend on my bias"?
Since the media tends to be liberally biased (really, it's true)
Bullshit. Studies have disproven that claim time and again.
Also, MSProject is a reasonable product. It does get the job done. Even though it comes from the Evil Empire -it still is a decent tool.
I don't think MSProject (or its clones) gets the job done: it forces you to represent far too much detail and complexity far too early, and it will discourage you from exploring alternatives or making necessary changes.
I think good project planning, like good design in general, is still best accomplished with paper, pencils, index cards, and tape.
Having written an HTML parser [...]
Again, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I wasn't arguing the relative merits of IE and FF, or which browser is the best in existence.
I was arguing that taking product X and turning it into open source project Y has a good chance of making it leaner, less bloated, and generally better quality. Do you agree that Firefox is a leaner, less bloated, and higher quality product than the last commercial Netscape release? Well, if so, then we aren't disagreeing on anything.
I remember the comments veering from "neural net laser-guided search functionality would be pretty cool" to "for the love of Stallman, please don't bloat our browser!" I think the thing that's been so significant about Linux is that it's been able to generally avoid this problem
I don't see "the problem". Have any of those been incorporated into FF? No. That's because those discussions are useful and productive. There are hundreds of add-ons, but only the ones that work well enough, have been tested enough in the real world, and are desired by enough users actually make it into the distribution. Sun and the JCP, on the other hand, evidently have little self-control.
I think that this is also part of what Sun fears about letting go of Java.
"Fear" implies that there is some unrealized horrible consequence. But this consequence is already realized: Java is already bloated because Sun is trying to put in every buzz-word compliant checklist item they can. If Sun Java were to become open source, the first thing people would do is remove most of the crud that has accumulated over the years. And you can be certain that such a lean Java distribution would be a lot more popular than the mess Sun is shipping.
What Sun "fears about letting go of Java" is that it's the only piece of software they control that is even vaguely still relevant to the computer industry. But they are killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs by not letting it go free.
MS Project is your main tool - learn it - live it.
Maybe it's your main tool.
You'll eventually become an old hand at doing project estimates!
That's nice. But projects aren't about delivering estimates, they are about delivering products.
What advice can you guys give me on not becoming a PHB?
It's hard to be a PHB without having hair. You'll still make stupid decisions, but you'll look cooler doing it.
now having two people who rarely venture outdoors except under duress
:-)
Easy: get them wireless access. The Danger Hiptop might work.
And, don't worry, once they discover real sex, they will venture outside again.
Do you ban them from using MSN?
Sounds like a good idea. They should be using Jabber.
Do you limit the number of hours they can be online?"
Oops, darn, what a shame, Windows crashed again. Kids, it will take me a few hours to reinstall. Sooner or later, they'll catch on and just install Linux for you, but at least that's educational.
Many Slashdot readers must have confronted this situation; how have you dealt with it, and what were the outcomes of what you did?
Yeah, I know, being a Slashdot reader myself, my parents have been trying to get me away from the computer as well, but with little success so far
Isn't this one of MS's salvos against Linux? That the TCO of Linux is higher because the techs command more money? Be careful of what you wish for - you might just get it.
How much you pay for tech support depends on both the cost and how much you need. Linux support may cost more, but you need a lot less of it.
As for Firefox, this basically boils down to a religious argument - you pretty much ignored the research showing that IE handles broken code better.
I was making an analogy between a bloated, feature-laden commercial product (which is what Netscape started out as) and what open source has been able to transform it into, Firefox. Even if IE were a better browser than Firefox, that would have no relevance to that analogy. (Of course, Firefox's stricter handling of "broken code" is deliberate.)
As for Java, I would be happy to see an effort - whether open or not - to get a thin client working
Well, that's my point: so would I. But Sun evidently isn't doing it themselves, and their control over Java allows them to keep others from doing it ("no subsetting"), so it isn't going to happen.
But sandboxing is not a function of the language - it is solely a function of the runtime.
Java isn't a language, it's a platform: it's the language, the entire set of official APIs, and the runtime. Sun says so (in fact, they insist on it), that's what they require compliance for, and they own the trademark.
(Note that, disturbingly, this bug in Sun's implementation shows that, not only is their implementation buggy, but their extensive certification process didn't catch the bug either.)
The Java sandbox has had how many security exploits discovered in the eight or nine years it's been around? Perhaps there have been a couple, but I can't remember any.
...? Oh right, because Java isn't open source.
The Java sandbox has had lots of security exploits over the years. I suspect the main reason people stopped discovering them is because Sun pretty much destroyed Java for applet use.
and you're complaining because
Indirectly, yes. Sun has lost its focus on a thin client platform and instead gone for the money--server side development. Open source could have forked Java as an applet platform before it got bloated and complex and focused on making it high quality for that purpose.
The major reason we don't see more is *not* because it's so much more robust
Oh, you are so wrong. The major reason Firefox works well is because the community took the bloated commercially-derived software (Mozilla) and pruned it down to its essentials (Firefox). It is about time that the same happened with Java.
Browsers aren't responsible for sandboxing plugins--in fact, they couldn't do it if they wanted to. Sandboxing is exclusively a function of the language and its runtime, in this case Java. If Sun's Java plugin allows the execution of dangerous code by untrusted code, it is Sun's fault. Note also that this is not the first time that this has happened.
Fortunately, the solution is simple: just turn off Java applets in your browser. These days, you won't be missing anything important on the web by doing so.
The "sandbox" that cordons off Java applets from the rest of the system has typically worked well.
When Java first came out, people found lots of security problems with its sandbox; there were both fundamental flaws in Java's type system and problems in Sun's implementation. That aspect of Java was subject to intense scrutiny back then because Sun had positioned Java as a new way of delivering client applications, which depended critically on sandboxing. The vision was that Java would replace heavy desktop apps.
These days, it doesn't matter much anymore: Java has failed to achieve its goals on the client; you can browse perfectly fine with applets disabled and never even notice. And for Java's current server side uses, sandboxing isn't really that important. So, people stopped finding flaws in Java's sandbox because they stopped looking--it just doesn't matter to anyone anymore.
I think Java's original vision of a thin client platform for high-quality applications delivered through the Internet is still relevant, but Java won't be able to fulfill it anymore: it has become too bloated and too complex. More likely, that niche will be filled by an updated version of Flash (yuck), XUL, or, perhaps, something entirely new.
tells me "what's that K icon where START should be", I call bullcrap on any point-and-click Linux.
You mean the "Start" button that is, among other things, used for shutting down Windows? Yes, that's one of the features that usability alone dictates Linux shouldn't emulate.
The reason I should say this is because my mom is extremely typical. Things "power users" take for granted (or, rather, don't even think about for one second) are very puzzling to many average computer users.
Yes, which is why Linux should copy Windows's usability problems. Linux has to do better, and that breaks compatibility. Linux has to appeal to the next generation of users, both here and abroad, not to the old Windows and Macintosh fogeys, who keep complaining and will never be really satisfied with anything other than the platform they grew up on anyway.
If your mother refuses to use Linux because she can't deal that the "Start" menu has a "K" on it, that's her problem. Most people are smart enough to figure it out that a menu that looks the same and is in the same place roughly does the same thing even if it has a K on it (the menu down there is already a concession; I think the Gnome default is preferable and clearer anyway). And most people also find savings of thousands of dollars in software enough of a motivation to get off their lazy butts and bother engaging their brain for a few minutes. But, ultimately, what your mother considers a "good UI" after years of having her mind warped by Microsoft software simply doesn't matter because the choices she makes don't matter to the long term future of the Linux desktop.
Let's look at your choices:
(1) You can get a sluggish end-of-life under-$1000 Macintosh with almost no software on it, shell out about $100/year to keep it up to date (not to mention the cost of all the other software upgrades), and then fiddle with CDs and downloads to install the latest versions of everything, or
(2) You can get a blazing under-$1000 Linux system that leaves the Macintosh in the dust, lets you pick the user interface and theme you like, comes with thousands of applications preinstalled, and comes with lifetime, automatic free upgrades.
No, it isn't. I'm sorry that you evidently don't understand why, but this is not the forum to discuss why there is a large number of people that prefer the Linux UI to the Macintosh UI. Given the immense amount of advocacy from people like you, you can rest assured that they are more than aware of the alternative and have made their choice deliberately.
Guys, this is the Mozilla section. I already deleted the Apple section from my frontpage because I'm tired of the ceaseless Apple marketing and rewriting of history by Apple fans. Making incorrect claims that open source projects are copying features from Apple, when the opposite is the case, are insulting and just make Apple look bad.
The JVM spec is open:
"Open" means that you can implement the spec as you like, and the JVM spec is not open (and neither are the language or the libraries): read the license linked to at the bottom of the spec that you yourself point to. Also read Stallman's take on this if you don't believe me.
Yes, I agree, they don't have a big "ECMA" or "ISO" badge, but well... since when were those worth a penny.
They guarantee that Microsoft can't play the kinds of legal games that Sun has been playing with the Java specification.
C++ has been ISO certified for years or decades,
Yes, and that has achieved exactly what it should: creating a choice of a large variety of compilers from many different vendors.
OK... let's say this: I like Javas design, you like C# design; it's futile to discuss taste issues, so I won't.
That's like saying that the difference betwee a dump truck and a school bus is a question of "taste". In fact, it's a difference in functionality, and a well-understood one at that. See here for a more extensive technical discussion of what Java is lacking if you don't believe me (the people there seem to have pretty much given up on Sun and Java, too).
It's unfortunate that Pascal gave type safety such a bad name: the language, as it was usually used for teaching, had such limited functionality and imposed such a straight-jacket on people that several generations of programmers thought type-safety made languages useless and that they needed to use something as unsafe as C to get any work done.
Yet, commercial implementations of Pascal were in pretty common use, had all the low-level facilities of C, and yet gave programmers a decent amount of type safety and runtime error checking. In fact, a lot of the early Macintosh software was written in ObjectPascal, and TurboPascal was very popular and very useful on the PC. Even the Apple II ran a pretty good Pascal development environment (in 64k of memory), with a decent screen oriented editor, menu bars, and an integrated compile/edit/run/debug system. Pascal syntax also was quite a bit less error prone than C/C++'s. Having pointer dereferencing be a postfix operator alone is just so much more sensible.
Perhaps much more interesting than Pascal, historically, are Algol-60, Simula-67, and Algol-68, which are related to it; Pascal was probably never intended to compete with them, but rather serve as an educational introduction to them and their successors. Around the same time, many fundamental ideas in programming languages were developed and implemented, including APL, Lisp 1.5, Snobol, PL/I, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Window systems, GUI toolkits, constraint-based programming, MVC, and other concepts we take for granted today followed shortly thereafter.
My point? You complained about Sun (claiming that Sun claims to have GC options, but that they have implementation problems).
.NET came out. Why does a huge company with huge research resources create such a poor implementation of the CLR?
I didn't "complain" about Sun. I simply pointed out that they started out with a pretty poor implementation and that it has taken them a long time to bring it to maturity. I also pointed out that C# is competitive with Sun's much older Java implementations now in terms of performance.
And what would the advantage of that be? Having only one way of accessing data is simpler. Having to decide (in C or C++) between Stack or Heap allocation takes up time and the difference can introduce subtle bugs.
The advantage would be that commonly used data types like complex numbers and 3D vectors behave the way programmers expect them to. If that confuses you, you are right, C# isn't the language for you.
Er... so... Suns implementation, dynamic compilers, GC options were known, when
Gosh, did you even bother to look at the story? Quite uncharacteristically, Microsoft did just about everything right with C#/CLR. Their own implementations are excellent. And, in contrast to Java, the C#/CLR standard is open and there are good open source implementations with extensive libraries. And C# is simply a better designed language than Java. It is also functionally a strict superset, which means that people will likely gradually migrate to CLR (either with a Java/CLR compiler or directly to C#) and never look back.
Such approaches give you only limited protection: if you don't trust the systems you plug into, you may still be subject to key logging, screen recording and other attack.
HotSpot, the Sun JVM, has had 8 byte object headers for years (at least since version 1.3).
.NET and Mono, we know that. What's your point?
So it still has 8 byte object headers, after all these years, instead of 4 bytes or less. (I qualified my statement only because I thought Sun might have fixed this in 1.5, but apparently not.)
NET still only [...] Mono actually uses the Boehm GC,
Yes, the Sun Java implementation is more mature than
Sun has made the right decision to keep the reference-type-only system
Right for their slice of the market perhaps. Wrong for general purpose computing. Give it another decade, and most Java compilers will probably target the CLR.
There's research for having more packed object headers, or for ways to even get rid of them (allocation in special pools,...). All of this can be implemented without adding special semantics, and this are areas for future JVMs.
The semantics of value classes are supposed to be different. Giving everything reference semantics would be the wrong thing to do even if the compiler managed to perform every possible optimization.
Sure... it's not available today, but 10 years back, Java was a simple bytecode interpreter with a mark-sweep GC.
There was no reason to create such a poor implementation back then; generational GCs, incremental GCs, dynamic compilation, and most of the other features used in Sun's JDK were already well-known at the time. Sun simply didn't use them.
Sun JVMs have had state of the art GCs for years.
There is Sun's feature list, and then there is actual implementation and performance, and that hasn't been all that impressive. Until fairly recently, Sun Java still had 12 byte object headers (I think they are still 8 bytes now, but I frankly just don't care anymore).
The only thing that remains is stuff like Escape Analysis
Yes, important stuff like that, stuff that other systems have had for many years. And other systems also have planned ahead in their language semantics to make this sort of thing work well, rather than taking a half-baked design and sticking with it forever.
which supposedly will make it into the next Java version
Whenever that may be.
Are you really sure there's no-one in Russia contributing to (F)OSS?
There are plenty of people in Russia contributing to FOSS. What I'm saying is that those people who complain about Western software prices and feel like they need to pirate software should stop complaining and use (and even contribute to) FOSS instead. Piracy isn't the answer to outrageous software prices, using something cheaper (or free) is. And that's true for the US as well.