On Jan 12, 2012, at 2:13 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Ross Walker <rswwalker at 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