[geeks] Go Apple....

[Dave McGuire]

On July 27, Bill Bradford wrote:
> >   I agree...but for me sometimes it's a toss up between MacOS X and
> > Solaris.
> 
> I was talking performance-wise.. Even on my 900Mhz UltraSPARC-III with
> 8M L2 cache, java stuff is slow..
> 
> (Sun Management Center in Sol9 for example..)

  I haven't seen it, so I can't offer comments about that particular
package.  Like any other language, it's possible to write bad code in
Java.  In an object-oriented language, it seems harder to write truly
*bad* code (dynamic allocation bugs, memory leaks, pointer stomping,
etc) than in a procedural language...but it's a whole lot easier to
write horribly *inefficient* code, especially if the programmer
doesn't know how computers really work.

  I'm not trying to defend Java here, honestly, even though I've come to
like it quite a bit...I'm just trying to point out the fact that bad
programmers can and do write bad/slow/buggy code in whatever language
they're writing in...and bad programmers seem to dominate the software
development world today.

  Java is a highly complex, extremely high-level language that's easy to
learn...however, to be *good* at it (i.e. to write code that doesn't
slow down a 900MHz UltraSPARC-III), one needs to understand some
pretty in-depth stuff.  Unfortunately, many people choose to program
in Java because it's easy to learn, and they think they're avoiding
all the work involved with learning "harder" low-level languages like
C (yes, C is a LOW-level language regardless of what your college
professor told you)...they can get a whole lot of code written very
quickly, but it won't be GOOD code (i.e. "fast' in this case) unless
they actually learn what the hell they're doing.

        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd