Re: Some Laws

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:<I5k4d.91137$D%.72678_at_attbi_s51>...
> "robert" <gnuoytr_at_rcn.com> wrote in message news:da3c2186.0409211922.21e7ea7f@posting.google.com...
> >
> > the java twinks are a herd of lemmings. who happen to be convinced
> > that any thought they have must be profound and original.
>
> That's just rude and uncalled for, and dead wrong to boot.
> Java has been and continues to be an extraordinary success,
> both in terms of popularity and in terms of getting work done.
> This popularity engenders an enormous amount of hostility
> and resentment for reasons I don't entirely understand. What's
> the opposite of shadenfreude?
>
> At the same time, I've never heard anyone in the Java camp
> claim any particular profundity or orginality. It's just a damn
> useful language is all. If you don't like it, that's fine, but to
> make up fake attributions for the Java camp and then lambaste
> them for it is the worst kind of rhetoric.
>
> Or perhaps you can provide a citation for James Gosling or
> Ken Arnold or Bill Joy or Guy Steele or someone like that in
> which they claim to be the best thing ever?

Arnold and Joy bailed. Gosling spends most of his breath bashing open source generally, and linux specifically. Steele, haven't kept track.

let's count: XML data, semantic web, java beans (Holub, Arnold, and Stroustrup, at least, are on record that the get/set paradigm is not OO), EJB, Swing.

there's a great quote, may have it in cubeland, that java is perfect for corporate development since it fits the "acretion of code" mode of operations. it fits very nicely with COBOL folk who see code and data as separate things: in java they call 'em data objects and action objects. further, the COBOL approach where a "file def" is needed to access the data, is not much different from java where one ties the data structure in code. this differs radically from the Application Independent Data Storage (tm) notion which grew from the relational model.

after all this is c.d.t. sometimes pointing out that the Emporer is naked is needed.

in all, i like java. what irritates me is the drive to turn it into COBOL. java folk i've met see the redundancy in their language: the relational database is really an object store without the froo-froo. it is data and behaviour rolled into one. with a standardized, which is to say language and application independent, access. this is not a good thing if you're desperate to lock in clients. same was true of pre-DB COBOL: you can't read a VSAM file w/o the file def in the COBOL. you had to have the application. with low cost DBs, there's no reason to lock yourself into some application code. the truth is in the data, and any application (or none at all) can access and update it without worrying about hurting it: it knows the rules to protect itself from knucklehead users, and knuckleheader coders. that's a great thing to have.

if you're a language maven: be afraid, be very afraid.

BobTheDataBaseBoy
>
>
> Marshall
Received on Fri Sep 24 2004 - 01:18:38 CEST