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Java != JVMJava != JVMPosted Mar 14, 2004 9:51 UTC (Sun) by joib (guest, #8541)In reply to: Java != JVM by ibukanov Parent article: Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet) On the other hand Python is often too dynamic and many errors that would be caught in a staically typed language are happen at run time. Personally, I think that static typing has its place, and that is in low level high performance languages like C/C++. For writing applications in a high level language like Java or python the argument is much weaker. Write any non-trivial program in Java and it's almost certain that you'll make extensive use of the collections classes. Well gee, say goodbye to your type safety. The only thing that static typing gives you here is lots of type casts all over the place (Ugh!). But I don't worry that much about the loss of static type safety. Unit tests (you do practice test driven development, now don't you?) will catch type errors, among many other things. Java even with its language design problems and even with only features available currently in GCJ fits network-bounded-server role resonably well. Personally, I would like to use python for this task too. But what saves Java, is that there is *a lot* of very high quality open source stuff for almost anything you can imagine. For starters, the spring framework and hibernate will take you a long way towards server-programming nirvana, despite the "over-verbosity" of Java. The only thing in the python world that even comes close is zope, and that is IMHO a bit too weird and un-pythonic. However, zope 3 does look promising, and I'm planning to take another look at zope once it's released.
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High-level vs. low-level useless Posted Mar 14, 2004 20:56 UTC (Sun) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] For modern languages, the distinction between "high-level" and "low-level" doesn't mean very much. A much more useful distinction is dynamic range -- how hard are the problems it's good for?For easy problems almost any language will do -- speed doesn't matter, programs are small, and maintenance is easy, so coding convenience is the most important thing. For hard problems, you need efficiency, apparatus to help organize lots of code, compile-time evaluation to abstract code generation, control of execution details to enable tuning, and effective compile-time error checking to make sweeping changes safe. Python covers the easy-problem space easily, and reaches far up into hard-problem space. C++ has everything needed for the hardest problems, but is not so convenient to use for banging out trivia. Java and C# fall somewhere in the middle -- way too inconvenient to displace Python, but lacking most of the features needed to take on hard problems confidently.
Java != JVM Posted Mar 18, 2004 12:05 UTC (Thu) by hjernemadsen (subscriber, #5676) [Link] Write any non-trivial program in Java and it's almost certain that you'll make extensive use of the collections classes. Well gee, say goodbye to your type safety. The only thing that static typing gives you here is lots of type casts all over the place (Ugh!). But that is not a problem with type safety, but rather a problem with the Java language. I you do the same thing in C++ you can use the STL-library, which amongst other things provides lists and sets of any type, with guaranteed type safety. So no type casts are needed, and you are guaranteed that you can only add the elements to the list, if they have the correct type. In my experience having type safety catches many programming errors.
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