Hacks

Hacks

Posted Oct 22, 2005 5:36 UTC (Sat) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)
In reply to: Hacks by ncm
Parent article: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

Good post, some comments:

>> For a little program, any language will do

Well said. I might add that in the case of "small" problems (and more problems are "small" than most people think), other issues, such as using the same language as your coworkers (as long as it is relatively appropriate) often outweigh a pure qualitative assessment.

>> Standard C++, for all its historical baggage, is still the only language
>> that even addresses the problem. A well-crafted C++ library can equal the
>> convenience and (immediate) power of a scripting language without
>> sacrificing performance or maintainability.

...and there are a lot of those libraries. C++ continues to be the language of "choice" for many large apps not just because of performance (I find the perfrommance of PyGtk apps or Eclipse, Jedit etc etc decent in most cases), but because

1. the language is stable,

2. is guided by standards,

3. has one dominant open implementation in gcc/g++ (even if this dominant implementation supports historically non-standard syntax).

I would argue that Java fails (1) as new features and libraries seemed to be tacked on endlessly as the marketing team attempts to repurpose the tool for a new audience (remember the Jini push?)

Clearly Java fails (2), although I don't think an ISO standard is that much of a big deal, not nearly as big a deal as (3). Look at perl or python...do you ever hear about compatibility issues across platforms? Never. This is because they are all addressing one runtime. In the Java world there will always be fragmentation because there will always be coders who will not accept a closed JRE.

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