[oclug] Zed

[Michael P. Soulier]

On 12/03/02 rod at giffinscientific.com did speaketh:

> That is a wierd analogy.  A lot of people got a bad flavour
> for Java because of applets - which at the time was a particularly bad idea,
> and still is. There were too many layers for the VM to run properly.  Too
> many things to go wrong.  But servlets are not applets.  Things have changed.

    Java hasn't gotten much faster in my experience. The only reason they're
competitive at all is due to the fact that servlets multi-thread, so you only
need one running. I'm not a fan of Java the language. It treats the programmer
like too much of an idiot for me, and they removed some of C++'s coolest
features. I don't like the fact that Java isn't truly open, and that I often
need tons of the latest libs to run the Java app of the week due to library
churn. 
    Then there's portability (not that portability matters with servlets).
Modern scripting languages are far more portable than Java. Java has a way of
making easy things hard, and hard things impossible. Can you tell I'm not a
fan? :)
    I did Java development for a while, but in the end we ended up switching
languages. As nice as Sun's promises about Java were, we just couldn't put up
with the horrid performance. Then they invented swing. *shudder* Great way to
make a slow language slower. 
    It might be acceptable some day due to Moore's law. I mean, we hardly ever
optimize in assembly anymore (C compilers usually do a better job than people
anyway), and C is the new assembly. But, we do ask more and more of our
processors every day, so I don't think C is going anywhere. 
    Honestly, I don't see much Java development in the open source community
compared to other languages. Obviously, that may change.

> JSP "containers" are not only among the fastest application servers, they are
> also the only technology capable of competing head to head with
> MS .NET technologies at the present time.

    Funny, but both Perl and Python have SOAP support, and I'd pit Zope
against any application server. Tcl currently has the fastest XSLT parser
going. 

    Java is mostly hype, with little delivered.

    Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier at mcss.mcmaster.ca>, GnuPG pub key: 5BC8BE08
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort."  -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
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