Stephen Shakland of CNET News.com has done an interview recently, with James Gosling about his views on the languages future and the development of the language.
Stephen Shakland of CNET News.com has done an interview recently, with James Gosling about his views on the languages future and the development of the language.
For me Java is a set of (meta-)frameworks. All these (meta-)frameworks are implemented with the same programming language, which is also called Java.
Carsten
Java is fit to implode soon. The complexity has reached the point where nothing works well. There is no elegance in the language; rather, it just an extremely large collection of crudely bolted-on class libraries. The de-facto Java IDE, Eclipse, has horrible state management issues that maybe will never be solved until a ground-up rewrite of Eclipse.
And to top it off, Sun never even had the guts to make Java 100% open standard, open source. Maybe people whose companies are not dependent on service revenue could have made the language better. Neither IBM nor Sun has been good for Java.
>Java is fit to implode soon.
Oh please…great wise one, tell us what is going to replace it?
I think most of what is helping Java is also hindering it. It took Microsoft comming out with an simular language with features programmers were asking for in order for Java to enter them in. Then Java goes and pulls a Netscape by jumping versions from 1.4 to 5.0. These tricks always speak of a desperate attempt. Netscape did it 2-3 years ago to get there version past Microsoft’s, now they are up to 8.0 or 9.0. Next I bet Java starts releasing beta versions of it’s software in complete versions too. It is dying, but some people just don’t see it because they are too close to the thing.
> great wise one, tell us what is going to replace it?
Parrot.
>Oh please…great wise one, tell us what is going to replace it?
Lisp.
Or maybe Scheme, O’Caml, Haskell, Python, Perl …
There are plenty of other languages out there that are better than Java and CO.
Java is still more elegant then C++. No diference for object, object reference and object pointer notation. No *, no &, no :: no => just .
“And to top it off, Sun never even had the guts to make Java 100% open standard, open source. ”
Neither has Microsoft with .NET, yet people dont complain about that ?
Because Microsoft doesn’t go around making a big deal of its ‘openess’ like Sun superficially does?
Java is fit to implode soon.
?
The complexity has reached the point where nothing works well. There is no elegance in the language; rather, it just an extremely large collection of crudely bolted-on class libraries.
Just like Perl, Java has libraries for anything you can think of, How can this be a disadvantage? About the core language, it is elegant in that it is extremely simple. I would say It is even simpler than Visual basic, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc.
The de-facto Java IDE, Eclipse, has horrible state management issues that maybe will never be solved until a ground-up rewrite of Eclipse.
Eclipse may be a bad choice, but there are others: Netbeans, Idea, etc. Just try Netbeans, you will be surprised.
And to top it off, Sun never even had the guts to make Java 100% open standard, open source.
Java is an open standard, and has been recently open sourced. Where it differs from other open-source projects is in the integration of user feedback. It is a slow process. But for many companies Java is an infrastructure, not a playground for the latest fads.
Unfortunately, no, Sun’s implementation of the Java specifications is not open source. It won’t ever be, afaict from Sun Microsystem’s repetedly reiterated position over the last 10 years.
I.e. if you want/need open source implementations, you wll have to move on to GNU Classpath.
cheers,
dalibor topic
“Unfortunately, no, Sun’s implementation of the Java specifications is not open source. It won’t ever be”
A specification can’t realyl BE opensource?
fwiw, the VM and related code IS Open Source!!!! – it’s just not Free Source
If we’re going to nitpick, at least do it properly.
Can anyone name a java-based application that has modern features (e.g., antialiased text), but doesn’t run dog-slow?
I’m not trolling; I’m serious. I’d love to believe everything that Sun tells me about java. But I have yet to see it run smoothly, without feeling archaic and unintegrated, in the *real world*.
I also have a hard time believing that this performance problem is entirely the developers’ fault.
Someone enlighten me. Please.
What is supposedly Java’s biggest strength is actually what is holding it back for me. Application portability on Java leaves much to be desired, despite what Sun wants to tell you. Windows, Linux (i386 only btw), Solaris, and Mac OS X are not the entire computing universe. Where’s FreeBSD’s 100% certified compatible Java 5 JDK? How about ones for non-Intel Linuxes. If you use one of the other BSDs, or an even more alternative alternative operating system, you’re really out of luck. Yes, there is always the Linux emulation support under the BSDs, but that’s not exactly what I would consider cross platform support. The FreeBSD foundation attempted to license and produce a certified version of Java for use on FreeBSD, but Sun essentially pulled the rug out from under them.
As it stands today, Perl, Python, and Ruby, especially coupled with the wxWidgets widget toolkit make for a far more cross platform programming experience.
Sun, if you really want to save Java from a miserable demise, please, please open source it so we can fix this and other shortcomings.
You guys are all complaining about java on the desktop…how many of you have used Java + JSP on the enterprise level? If you write your applications properly it’s extremely easy to modify, update and change your code without having everything fall in around you? Ever use hibernate? Where’s the ORM in .net and php? I mean don’t even use .net as an example for enterprise apps…it doesn’t even have an iterator class!! We don’t even know what type of sort the sorting class uses! Is it 0(nlogn) or 0(x^2), no one knows. Java is here to stay, maybe not on the desktop level but at the enterprise level where real work gets done by real people who need stability and realiability. Too bad you’re all to blind to see it.
The Java spec is open, write your own JVM.
The Java spec is open, write your own JVM.
There are many open source JVMs out there. The JVM is not hard to clone, it’s the support libraries that come with Java that are hard to reproduce, simply due to the immense complexity and scope that they cover.
With that said, GCJ + GNU Classpath is almost there, but as the WINE and Mono folks know, it’s hard playing catchup to a moving target.
java – tcl/tk without the tcl and slower….
Is this a good example?
It is said that because of Netscape’s licence terms MS made its own version (JScript) …
(But perhaps MS had different intentions and this was a welcome excuse …)
Then MS extended its version as they did with Java.
But Sun could stop them, at least partially …
Thus they came up with a new strategy (.NET and C#).
Is that much better?
Of course, there are even different versions of JavaScript “met” in different browser versions, but that wouldn’t be better if JavaScript remained proprietary.
It would be very sad if a non-Sun open source version of Java surplanted the Sun offerings and became the defacto standard. I think Sun fails to realize that their “stamp of approval” is meaningless if 80% of Java instances use an open source version of Java. What is commonly used is more important than what is ratified. Java has a much larger foothold in non-Windows systems, and those same systems are the most likely to gravitate towards open source Java versions. Sun needs to wake up and open source Java completely or they may only be rememberd as the people that invented it.
pascal!