Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 12th Jul 2009 21:29 UTC
Even though news has been slow the entire week due to the fact that it's summer and people are more interested in vacation than in technology news, we still had a lot of interesting stuff this week. Google obviously captured the headlines with its Chrome OS, but we also talked about Mono, Richard Stallman, and many other things.
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Member since:2009-06-30
Probably not Java but JDK and JVM are overly complex and should be revised (or Java completely discontinued, nobody loves it anyway).
You call it "overly complex", I call it "robust". If .Net reaches the same level of maturity (although as a Windows only toolkit it may never do) it will also get features, multiple implementations, helper tools etc.
BTW, calling for Java to be discontinued is... funny, to say the least.
Member since:2006-03-01
C# vs Java is not just one language against the other it is also the std libraries of .NET vs JDK and CLR against JVM and the concepts that follow from this.
The .NET libraries are many, many, many times easier to use compared to the JDK libraries. In .NET you have one or two ways of doing a specific thing and you are almost never in doubt what the designers were thinking when they created the API for the given namespace.
You can't be serious. The JDK library is showing its age at some points, but it is fundamentally well-designed. For example, the available collections are reasonably named and also complete. Interfaces are named after concepts, and implementations are named after specific algorithms. For example, you have a Set interface, implemented by a HashSet and TreeSet class.
In .NET there are no interfaces at all for some concepts (for example Set). collection classes are named confusingly (List is an ArrayList, SortedList is not a list at all, but a dictionary where the keys are sorted, etc. ). Thread-safe collections are extremely incomplete.
And don't get me started about the documentation. The MSDN documentation is a complete mess. There are examples in all .net languages, but never more than one paragraph about one topic. For example you have different pages for "type X", "members of type X", etc so you never have a useful amount of information on one page.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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Member since:
2008-10-30
C# vs Java is not just one language against the other it is also the std libraries of .NET vs JDK and CLR against JVM and the concepts that follow from this.
The .NET libraries are many, many, many times easier to use compared to the JDK libraries. In .NET you have one or two ways of doing a specific thing and you are almost never in doubt what the designers were thinking when they created the API for the given namespace. It is a completely different story for the JDK, it is convoluted, full of surprises and gives you plenty of guidance on how to do the wrong things (and no guidance on how to do it right). Essentially the concept behind the core .NET is POLS (Principle Of Least Surprise) and it is done in an coherent way. JDK on the other hand seems to be made by at least 5 sub groups that does not talk to each other or sometimes actively tries to sabotage each other.
Then there is the component orientation of .NET that is second to none when it comes to system programming. This is the real innovation of .NET is that you roll up your library in one self contained component that contains all you need for development and runtime for different consumer languages and different producer languages (with the DLR now also scripting languages can be producer languages) so .NET advocates complete transparency when making components. This is good for open source in that it very easy to bring in Python, Ruby and C# into the same application domain (you can extend C# classes in Python and extend from that in C# again, try doing that in Java :-)
Probably not Java but JDK and JVM are overly complex and should be revised (or Java completely discontinued, nobody loves it anyway).