[geeks] perlish disgruntlement, java considered, sun hardware sought

[David Cantrell]

On Sun, Apr 07, 2002 at 08:14:25PM -0400, alex j avriette wrote:

> i'd like to start off by saying that i dont dislike perl. what i dislike 
> is the perl userbase. i find that there is a very small group of people 
> (perhaps only slightly larger than the perl5-porters mailing list) who 
> actually care about their code.

Oh it's a great deal larger than just the p5p list, but admittedly still
only a small part of the total user base.  I suspect this applies to all
languages.

> perhaps perl6 will change this. perhaps perl5.8 will begin to change 
> this.

No, 5.8 will be an incremental change from 5.6.  The language will be largely
the same, and the user base will be the same.  I'm not going to hold my
breath waiting for perl 6.  It's already over a year late and the language
isn't even designed yet.

> because perl positions are becoming harder to find, it is now important 
> for me to know java.

Perl positions seem to be picking up again now :-)

> so i bought a couple of the Sun Press java books. it seems like a 
> reasonably easy language to pick up

yes it is.  The first edition of Java In A Nutshell not only taught me Java,
but also taught me OO programming.  As well as being a good reference, it
was *also* an excellent tutorial.  Later editions dropped the tutorial, and
therefore sucked.

I haven't really found any other Java books that I'd rate that highly.  But
then I haven't done any Java for the last three years.

> currently, my java development machine is a pentium pro 200. the reason 
> for this (i've got quite a few faster machines) is that the openbsd 
> ports tree conveniently builds absolutely everything i need quickly and 
> everything just "works." my osx machines have java seemingly working but 
> if i want to install anything im screwed because of the nonstandard 
> paths and libs. im sure you can imagine that even an ultra2/300 is a 
> significant upgrade from a pentium1/200.

I used to do Java development on a machine something like a P1/200.  It was
sufficient for my needs.  Maybe when you get on to real-world application
development you'd need more, but for learning the language it's enough.

>                                    i *hate* the web. i dont want to 
> hear about jsp or servlets or applets or *barf* *hurl* *gag* .. ahem.

And yet you say one of the reasons for learning Java is because all the
web application servers like BEA (ab)use it? :-)

-- 
Grand Inquisitor Reverend David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

   The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons