On Jan 12, 2012, at 2:13 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Ross Walker rswwalker@gmail.com wrote:
Corporate greed will always trump idealistic pursuits.
I'm still pondering how Sun's demise fits into this picture....
As soon as a product has enough momentum there will be patent fights, copyright fights, licensing and revocation of openness. Soon platforms that contribute the most $$ will get preference and features over others and there goes the cross-platform dream.
Throw your weight behind nothing, use the best technology at the time for the solution. The only true cross-platform language is C.
You can't be very agile working in C, though. Something called C with roughly similar syntax may work on a lot of platforms but that doesn't mean that you can actually compile and run the same code. Where with java you don't even have to recompile. Look at how jenkins is able to run in master/slave mode with slaves running on an assortment of platforms at once. What would you have to do to match something like jasper reports or the pentaho tools ability to connect to databases and do page layouts in C in a way that would work on such a wide assortment of systems?
Of course C isn't very flexible by itself and often needs a library (or OS) to make it truly useful.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying everything should be written in C.
What I was trying to say is that as a language C is both cross-plaform and open and it's the "openness" that prevents "lock in" as much as it being cross-platform.
Now if Oracle would fully open Java, then I would add that to my list of cross-platform languages, but until then it's a language I feel would "lock me in".
-Ross