[rescue] damn you bill, now i'm a lowbrow fan too

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 03:40:07AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> >   Yeah, that blows.  Java *rocks*...but java and web browsers are a
> 
> Eek.  How could you say such a thing?

It's elegant and simple OOP with a runtime library that (when combined
with all the free add-ons at java.sun.com) approaches dwarfing PERL in
out-of-the-box utility.  Yeah, it runs slow as molasses, but, in a few
circumstances, the fact that it runs without a problem on four of the
biggest platforms out there (Win32, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX), and runs
reasonably well on Linux and FreeBSD[1], can overcome the fact that it's
so damned slow.

I wouldn't want to use an office suite or Mathematica-workalike written in
Java, but competent Java programmers can write really nice applications in
it that are smaller in scale and don't suffer (as much) from the overhead
of interpretation.  But, from the other side, a really big app written in
TCL/TK, or Scheme or any other directly-interpreted language (I think PERL
is just- in-time compiled these days, so it doesn't qualify) would be
approximately as slow.

Have you actually used Java?  I mean, if you have, and it's not your bag,
that's fine, just like PERL isn't mine (even though I have to kick it
around every now and again because there's so -much- stuff written in it).
If you haven't, and are only put off by the execution speed, take a look
at the documentation for all the functionality, and you might reconsider
your position.  Java's a fine language with an elegant (if wordy) syntax.

Oh, and that crap about every public class having to be in its own source
file gets under my skin for tiny projects, but it's ultimately enforcing a
Good Thing.

I don't -personally- like OOP all that much, but I find it easier to write
GUIs in that paradigm.  As a result, about 90% of the Java I've written
consists of lightweight graphical frontends to a big, bad C process
running elsewhere on the network.

--Jonathan
[1] The JVM/J2SDK -did- finally get ported, right?  Or did I dream that?