Java, was Re: [geeks] my head just went explodey

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 5 Apr 2005, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Most Java I see is about the same quality level as most Visual Basic
> that I see, and I think some of the reasons are largely the same.
>
> All of which makes me ask, what is the point?

The biggest win for me is portability.  Most of the two-tier and
three-tier systems that I build have a daemon written in C living on a
server somewhere doing some task and a front-end written in Java.  If I
used something other than Java, I'd need to write separate clients for
Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, and AIX.  With Java, I get that much
portability "for free", but I have to accept that there are some
platforms (the BSDs, for example) that will never be well-supported at
all.

Generally I try to make a two-client approach; Java for most-everyone
and a good command-line or curses client for people who either cannot or
don't want to use the Java GUI client.

I'm working on the design of a generalized implementation of this, since
this approach works really well for me, but I'd like to stop reinventing
the wheel.

> I suppose my biggest beef with Java, is how it is so hyped, along with
> C++ and PHP, that other very good languages go largely unused.

Indeed.  One can build the whole world in C and Lisp.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  )   "Once again, `digital' is proving to be a
Elgin, TX         (     synonym for `crap'."
USA                )                    --Andrew Orlowski on DRM