The Threshold of Immortality

[rizzix]

An interesting article about Java: the platform, the langauge and the ecosystem; by IBM: Dead like COBOL.

[wtd]

Scala, Groovy, JavaFX, JRuby, Jython, etc... Java is dead, long live Java?

[btiffin]

Nice article. It needs a paragraph or two on the assassination attempts by Microsoft. Emerging through years of MS's "suffer no other software to live" attacks has made me more a fan of Sun and Java than ever before. (My professional experience with Java was in the EJB arena. I felt it was an unworkable technology even while working it; so my initial feelings towards Java were tainted. All better now.)

Long live Java. I'll even opine that developers that use .NET exclusively are lemmings and rubes, unwittingly working for MS and not for the greatest benefit of themselves or their employers.

Always watch; Any technology diss'ed by Microsoft is technology worth picking up. They will only go after tech that is good (therefore bad for their profit margin) so it really is a litmus test of what a moral free-thinking developer should be seeking to learn and nurture.

Cheers

[Zeroth]

Like IronPython? Oh, and don't forget about Mono for *nix platforms. Its almost compatible! /sarcasm

I have to admit, I do dislike the language, but I admire the capabilities of the JVM. To be able to be repurposed for quite a few distinct and different languages is impressive. And Java didn't do anything stupid like restrict functionality to just Java, etc. They made it all available, unlike MS's CLI. Their CLI hookups only work best in C#, and they artificially hobbled visual c++ so people would use c#.

Sun has worked hard on all levels of the Java system, and that is quite impressive. Most notably, that for awhile, Java had worse performance on Solaris boxes than Windows. One of my prof's loves solaris, has several Solaris 7's, yes 7's, running, and he showed us benchmarks of a Java program on solaris, then on Windows. It was pretty bad for awhile there.

The article is right, in that Java will keep on ticking for over ten years or more. Thats okay. Its still a better language than C/C++, or Cobol. And its a bit easier to maintain when the programmers don't go crazy with abstraction. I am particularly glad that Java has been opensourced, just in case Sun goes down one of these days.

[Aziz]

"better than C/C++" isn't an accurate statement. You don't write an operating system or embedded code in Java, and you don't write web applets (and now web applications) in C/C++. They're really different beasts, and really the only thing they do in common is complex GUI applications and database apps.

Now, wait for wtd or someone to show an OS written in Java and a webapp written in C. (Wait, what's Solaris written with?).

[rizzix]

Solaris is written in C, most likely. However there are Java OSs, for example: JNode and JX

[Zeroth]

*snickers at Aziz* You asked for it. When I said better, I of course meant "better to develop in". I, being a mind reader myself, assumed everyone knew what I had meant. And Aziz, you can write an OS in any language you want, so long as there is a compiler that can do so for your target machine. It is possible to compile Java code to machine code, using gcj. Hell, using PyPy, I could write an OS in Python. Wouldn't that be fun?

[rizzix]

The Java OS's mentioned are not compiled to machine code. In fact they run on a jvm kernel, which itself is written in Java. How do they do it?

Look up the http://jikesrvm.org/. -- Of course at some point there will be some translation to machine code.

[OneOffDriveByPoster]

rizzix @ Thu Jun 19, 2008 1:49 am wrote:

Dead like COBOL.

Interesting coming from IBM. Of course, old software never dies (except versions of Microsoft Windows). I think COBOL and PL/I is living on somewhere. Never used them though.

[jernst]

OneOffDriveByPoster @ Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:19 pm wrote:

rizzix @ Thu Jun 19, 2008 1:49 am wrote:

Dead like COBOL.

Interesting coming from IBM. Of course, old software never dies (except versions of Microsoft Windows). I think COBOL and PL/I is living on somewhere. Never used them though.

Oddly enough at WLU they had a COBOL class until last year so i took it. The prof went on a tangent the one day and said that the Bruce Power plant uses COBOL code still because it works and they dont want to mess with what works. lol. apparently there is only like one guy left that still understands what they've done there so they fly him in from the states every now and then and pay him huge to perform maintenance on it.

[btiffin]

OneOffDriveByPoster @ Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:19 pm wrote:

rizzix @ Thu Jun 19, 2008 1:49 am wrote:

Dead like COBOL.

Interesting coming from IBM. Of course, old software never dies (except versions of Microsoft Windows). I think COBOL and PL/I is living on somewhere. Never used them though.

OpenCOBOL 1.0 is out. 1.1 is in pre-release. I hope to help out with documenting some of it.

http://opencobol.org

Cheers