[rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Patrick Giagnocavo 717-201-3366]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 14:06, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> We have an entire industry sold on Java, .NET, and how many other
> interpreted abominations (Ruby, Python, etc.) for applications that need
> to scale to thousands of users.  INTERPRETED!  Yes, let's buy the
> fastest processors on the planet and then make them spend 30% of their
> time just trying to translate the code we wrote into something they can
> understand!  That make Perfect Sense!  After all, we can just buy more
> hardware!

Can I just point out that TCL, while interpreted, does not seem to overall blow chunks as badly?  And LISP can be quite fast, even when interpreted ... ISTR criticism of LISP when it needed 8MB of RAM to run well; and now the help viewer under Windows probably takes 8MB.

> But, hey, hand these same CS grads C++ and look what a mess they can
> make.  Pick any large C++ application (OpenOffice, Mozilla, Microsoft
> Office); it's a nightmarishly over-complicated cesspool of bugs that
> requires more megabytes of memory than we had in disk space a few years
> back.  So maybe the recent orgy of runtime-interpreted tools is only the
> tip of the iceberg.

Well, have a look at Objective-C then.  Or LISP?

> It is.  Unfortunately, until we finally hit The Final Brick Wall, people

There will be no Final Brick Wall because Intel keeps making performance and process improvements ... I think that secretly the hardware makers love to see us churning out "UML hackers" and "HTML programmers" .

--Patrick