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Subject: Re: Java is for kiddies
From: James Rogers <jamesr@best.com>
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Date: 28 Aug 2002 10:58:35 -0700

On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 09:58, Gary Lawrence Murphy 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.


My typical Java-to-C conversion doesn't increase the lines of code by
more than 20%, and a fair portion of that is the implementation of
additional features that drove us to do the conversion in the first
place.  Some things are substantially more succinct when written in C
than in Java.  C and most other mature languages have an endless
collection of libraries.  I personally don't use anything beyond the
core libraries of any language that much though.

On a tangent, I find libraries nearly useless for a great many things
due primarily to the fact that most of them are so general that a given
non-trivial API almost always has a context in which it will function in
a pathological manner.  Code reuse is wonderful and all that, but
libraries frequently make design trade-offs that won't work for me even
if they theoretically do exactly what I need.  Unfortunately, it isn't
particularly easy nor does it make a nice simple API to design a library
that really is optimizable to a wide range of design cases.  I've built
a small collection of flexible psuedo-polymorphic APIs over the years
that I tend to use, but it is a pretty ugly solution for code reuse when
you get right down to it.


-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com



