🚀 go-pugleaf

denatale@nando.net (Rick DeNatale) wrote:

>In article <31684F33.2528@ibm.net>, Ernie Wright <javaguy@ibm.net> wrote:

>It doesn't bode well for the ultimate fate of a language when important
>things that people want to do with the language aren't provided in
>standard ways in the language. This is one of the reasons that we don't
>have Pascal to kick around much anymore, one of the reasons that C took
>over Pascal's predominant place as a personal computer programming
>language is that Pascal left any kind of reasonable I/O as an exercise to
>the reader, and there was no common way of doing it, while C's (actually
>Unix's) stdio package was easily supported on most of the common operating
>systems.

Yeah. Now, how many add-ons do you need for C++ and small talk to make
it web conversent ?

>And just what is Java anyway? As I understand it, much of the Java
>excitement is really about using it to build thin clients by extending Web
>Browsers (as if we will really get thin clients based on things like
>Netscape, have you seen what kind of resources it requires?).  This really
>means JavaScript, which as I understand it is Java-like, but isn't really
>compatible with Java. Yes, I know that this could probably be rectified,
>but it's hard to get the horses back in the barn.

Java is revolutionary because it's native 'operating system' is the
net. It's native shell a web browser. It can leverage all that
functionality to do some really wonderful things. And it's small. Very
small. I've got an entire mud in just 300K. Java is designed for
networks. It's designed for client/server over networks. It can do it
all from the standard class libraries.

>>How do you think JAVA will fare when it has 16 years under its belt like
>>Smalltalk, really.......look how fast this is happening, aren't at least
>>interested in it since you are in this forum?

>But Smalltalk has really had more than 24 years under it's belt, and has
>only really been widely available for less than half of that time.  It had
>a chance to mature and become coherent and mature in a nurturing
>environment before it had to face the cold cruel world.

Java will be dead after 16 years (at least it had better be). Most
languages are best exploited while they are young and able to adapt to
best exploit their environment. When a language has been around to
long it starts getting all sorts of nifty new functions grafted onto
it until you end up with more graft than language and its original
elegant structure has disapeared. 

Mik