On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 10:32 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >>> >>>> Would someone advise whether the distribution of an obsolete version >>>> of java should be reported as a bug; >>>> http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=827 >>> >>> One *could* argue that Java is a bug, being a) so error-prone, b) so >>> vulnerable to attack, and c) so huge and slow, and shouldn't be >>> allowed.... >> >> But you'd be wrong on all counts. I'd argue the opposite - that you >> should only be allowed to use languages that work across CPU types and >> OS's so as to never be locked into a monopolistic single vendor. > > No, I wouldn't. You argue wrongly. For one, by your first sentence, you > deny all of my arguments, with no reasons for that denial. The reasons are obvious. Java is common on phones, so there goes the 'huge' argument. OpenNMS can monitor thousands of nodes, so it's not slow. It's not more or less vulnerable to attack than anything else, so why even mention it? > As someone > who's worked more as a programmer than an admin, and both for a long time, > in a lot of languages, I see almost all java programs as huge. So how do they run on phones? And what is huge these days anyway - an extra dollar's worth of RAM? > I also know > that *if* you write your code correctly, the code will compile and run on > pretty much anything, unless you're writing windowing-system specific > stuff. That's if you know every quirk of every target system - and have all the associated compilers, and take the time to compile on all of them. > Then there's java, that in everything I read from the mid-nineties through > the mid-oughts, was presented as being free from memory errors, etc, etc, > but as one huge counter-example, just about every time I see a tomcat app > crash, the stack traces are 150-200 calls deep, and there are, indeed, > memory errors. You can write badly in any language, can't you? And why bring up old versions? You can take just about anything you were running in the 90's up to maybe a few months ago and realize now that it had horrible bugs. Unless maybe it was written by Donald Knuth... > Further, it's nothing more than a re-imagining (as they say) of Pascal > p-code (quick: what other language besides java used the command > writeln?). That's a good thing, now that (a) processes are fast enough that you don't care about the interpreter speed and (b) there are techniques to use native libraries anywhere it does matter. > The difference between recompile and run on a vm that's > compiled for that machine is? Oh, right, it is, in effect, another layer > that sits on top of the o/s, like a pseudo-os, or windowing system. Yes, if you don't like language abstractions you could code in assembly for a particular CPU. > I can go on... but I really need to get around to writing my article to be > entitled, "The Failure of OOP in General, and Java in Particular". There's something to be said for functional programming and message passing instead of objects in these days of distributed and multi-cpu systems, but nobody really thinks that way. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com