Rogers and BitTorrent: another datapoint

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 01:23:28PM -0400, Michael MacLeod wrote:
> Any programmer that only knows one language well isn't worth the time of
> day. A decent programmer is going to be able to look at the problem,
> determine if OO is a good fit or not, and use any of a number of languages
> they know well, both OO and not, to solve the problem.

I use many different languages depending on what I am doing.

> People that rail against Java - or any language - as not being a good fit
> for everything under the sun or for being the latest 'fad' in computers
> (despite being 15 years old) seem to have missed something important. I
> wouldn't ask a contractor to build me a house with only a hammer, so there's
> no reason why programmers should feel compelled to use only a single tool.

I just am not convinced that there was anything java was good at.  It
has gotten better over the years, while causing tons of frustration
along the way.

> I'm not being a Java apologist here, I'm just glad that I understand both
> the OO and the procedural paradigms, and that I know both C and Java (in
> addition to others) equally well. I think that these skills and the ability
> to know when to apply which ones will make me much more valuable to any
> potential employers than a programmer hellbent on sticking to the one
> language he/she knows.

I think part of what has made my quite anti java is:

The initial claims:
compile once, run anywhere (no it didn't)

The language kept changing and libraries would just not work on a system
because it had the previous version of java.  This gets really annoying
rather quickly, especially when you consider their 'slogan' above.

It had no native compiler.  I like efficiency.  Java seemed to want to
do the exact opposite.  Waste resources of all users to same some work
for the developer.  At least there are now a few native compilers for
java.  I find a lot of runtime libraries are rather rediculous in size.
C++ is no exception there.  Java, .net, module3, VB, etc all have
insanely large runtimes.  Sure this makes the developers life easier for
some things, but sometimes it seems unacceptable that a developer makes
you install 25MB of runtime libs to run a small program that could
probably have been done in C with not much more effort and than taken
200KB total.  It seems that often the only reason for buying a faster
machine with more ram is to make up for a lazy developer.

I really couldn't stand java's hype, most of which was really rather
unsubstantiated and often downright false.

Maybe someday virtual machines will make sense.  So far I am not
convinced they make sense.  Were we not all supposed to be using
microkernels by now?  What happened to those?  And then there were RISC
processors.  Good concept, except when taken to the extreme, which is
why most processors now use some of the concepts but not all.  The
original goal wasn't practical or realistic.

--
Len Sorensen
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