[rescue] Sun memo regarding Java

[Dave McGuire]

On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 11:44 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo 
+1.717.201.3366 wrote:
>>    Does Sun "own" TCL now?  Does Ousterhout work for them now or
>> something?
>
> Sun sponsored it and for a while they funded Ousterhout.  I guess I
> would have a dig into the history a little more to say whether O~ did
> and then was hired by Sun, or did it while he was at Sun.

   Oh ok, I didn't know they funded him.  I thought he did all that 
stuff while he was at UC Berkeley.

>>    Also, this "better" thing...Better at what?  GUIs?  Network
>> programming?  Database programming?
>
> GUIs - check (TK, SpecTCL, decent geom. mgr, etc.)
> Network programming - check (scotty, etc.)
> Database programming - check (AOLserver, nstcl.sf.net, etc.)
>
> What other tasks do you need?

   Yes I know TCL *can do* those things.  Hell, so can Perl for that 
matter.  That doesn't make it any better for those things, and I don't 
believe it is.  Except for very small things like configuration tools 
and such.

   I should probably point out that we're edging dangerously close to 
"developer's personal preferences" territory.  I've programmed in both 
Java and TCL, and I don't find TCL easy at all.

> There are tools to obfuscate and lock it.  You can dump just the
> bytecodes and load only that into the interpreter, IIRC.  Which is
> about as good as you will get from Java, right?

   Yes, and then you're modifying one of the basic design principles of 
the tool just to make it do what you want it to do.

   That's on par with building fully-switched ethernet networks just to 
get performance out of [the poorly-designed] ethernet technology.

   TCL is an interpreted scripting language.  A damn fine, well 
designed, and well implemented one.  I personally don't like it much, 
but I recognize that it's Good Stuff(tm).  But it's still an 
interpreted scripting language...and as such is not, and will never be, 
suited to the development of large applications, in my opinion.

>>    80MB of crud spewed across your spindles?  What Java are YOU 
>> running,
>> man?
>
> OK, enlighten me, how much disk does your development environment
> take?  I had to download about 20MB compressed of stuff.
>
> hmmm, on my OpenBSD box running Linux emul Java:
>
>  du -sk jdk1.3.1-linux/
> 56678   jdk1.3.1-linux/
>
> OK, 60MB instead of 80MB.  No extra classes, no docs in that part of
> the tree.

   Yeah, ok, it's 87MB under Solaris with a bunch of other classes 
installed.  In ONE DIRECTORY TREE.

   A quick add-up of /usr/lib/*.a and /usr/local/lib/*.a is pretty big 
too.  Granted, not THAT big, but still pretty big.

   I suppose it's a pretty good thing that neither number is considered 
large in this era of 1GB operating system installs and 100+GB disks, 
huh?

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley