On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 10:47 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >> >>>> 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. >>>> >>> So if I were to develop a CPU type and/or OS that didn't support Java >>> then you would lock yourself out of the very language you appear to >>> advocate? >> >> Being locked out of some oddball thing is not at all the same >> situation as being locked into what only a single vendor provides. But >> try something like 'jenkins' (http://jenkins-ci.org/) with an >> assortment of cross-platform nodes to get the idea of how handy a >> language with remoting across many platforms can be. It's painless to >> install try, even if you only use it on a single box. > > I have a one-word answer: perl. But which version, on systems where it isn't included? > A longer answer - are you suggesting > system admin chores being done using some kind of java monstrosity? I > mean, I don't remember what Spacewalk's written in, Spacewalk's problem is that it is written as components in a bunch of different languages and tied to a specific DB interface. Java could have solved all of those problems, but Red Hat did about as much as any company could to kill java - by shipping something that didn't quite work and wasn't quite java back then. > but it was a very > large pain, and if it's not in java, then the java version would be a > *lot* worse..... Yes, I would love to see a complete admin system in java, although you don't want to spin up a JVM for every command line you type - you'd want a long-running service with agents already running/connected everywhere. OpenNMS is excellent for the monitoring part of system administration. Jenkins is great for doing builds and maybe deployment (java or not). Jenkins can be expanded to do a lot more as a generic cross-platform distributed queuing/scheduling/scripting system but since it was designed as a continuous integration build system (compile/test across a matrix of platforms whenever a source change is committed), security isn't a real strong point. Both are painless rpm installs on linux if you let them run on their own ports with their embedded web servers. Try them before repeating misinformation about how bad things are. And then there are things like elasticsearch that might be possible in some other language but it just doesn't seem to exist (not particularly admin related, but if other languages are so great where is the equivalent?). If you don't like the verbosity of java (and who does?), you can use groovy as a more modern dynamic typed alternative for scripting. It runs in the same jvm and can import/access any normal jars that are already compiled in java. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com