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To: harley@argote.ch (Robert Harley)
Cc: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
Subject: Re: Java is for kiddies
References: <20020828165937.B53E9C44D@argote.ch>
From: Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>
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Date: 28 Aug 2002 15:06:39 -0400

>>>>> "R" == Robert Harley <harley@argote.ch> writes:

    R> GLM wrote:
    >> And a Java program, due to the extensive class libraries, will
    >> weigh in at 10% the number of lines of the equivalent C
    >> program.  QED.

    R> There are massive amounts of libraries for C, Fortran and so
    R> on.  To pick an obvious example., if you want to do linear
    R> algebra, then Java isn't a serious candidate at all.

If you want to do http, C gets pretty muddy (curl is about the best
choice I've found) but I grant you that: No language is the be-all and
end-all.

I envy some of those posting to this list.  I've been in business for
24 years and I haven't yet had the luxury of writing every line of
code for any project. We are always coerced by budgets and time to
maximize the amount of work done elsewhere.  

As much as I hate dealing with someone else's blackbox, as much as
I've spent sleepless nights second-guessing external libs, I've never
ever had the luxury to do otherwise. It must be wonderful to be
responsible for something you are actually responsible for, and I am
so sick of being blamed for other people's design mistakes.

Maybe there's an archive somewhere I need to know about, but I've been
using C since DrDobbs first published SmallC and yet I've never found
any decent LGPL libs cataloged in such a way that I can just type in
the task and get back an API.  Because of Javadoc, which is by no
means perfect, Java provides me the second best catalog of 3rd-party
libs, second only to Perl's CPAN -- Perl is one language I also really
hate with a passion, yet end up using the most for exactly this reason.

For example, take the recent CBC Olympics site: I needed to roll
together a telnet client with a tokenizer, perl-regex preprocessing a
stream to produce parseable XML, project that XML into relational
databases using only the DTD to generate the rdbms schema, and open an
XMLRPC interface to read and post items into the news stream.  Where
can I find C libs for those components?  

On the webserver, we then needed a multithreaded read-only http socket
which can spawn persistent data-caching servlets that periodically
refresh themselves over socket connections to the relational database,
presenting the retreived values through XSLT-defined transforms, and
again, where can I find such stuff for C ... or for any other langauge
but Java?  Wombat (servlet spec for Perl) was inviting, but it's not
ready for prime-time, and re-inventing that entire shopping list in C
is just not feasible for one programmer to do inside of 8 weeks.

When you need C libs, or even C++ libs, where's the best place to shop?
Where do you find standards-based portable RDBMS API? (ODBC?) How do
you evaluate these things without actually fetching every one and
trying it out?

In a perfect universe, I'd use Ocaml or even Ruby, but I don't see the
social infrastructure for either happening during my professional
lifetime.

    R> Why do so many people outside of Sun's marketing department
    R> consider Java to be "Write Once, Debug Everywhere" ?

A collegue at Cognos (Henk?) called C "the nearly-portable assembler"

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
 Business Advantage through Community Software : http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


