--- bill lam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Tracy Harms wrote:
> > Notice that said article was published Jan. 2006!
> > (IEEE Computer)
> 
> IMO Wirth still thinks (in 2006) that by using a language (Pascal) that 
> restricts what a programmer could done will enforce a good and correct 
> program. 
>   This is exactly opposite to C (J as well).  Kernighan wrote some 20 years 
> ago,
> "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language"
> http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

I watched an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, 
   http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/transcripts/Episode035Transcript.aspx
implementor of one of the most brilliant programming platforms that
raised a whole generation of programmers and currently
re-release by Borland--the Turbo series; and founder of
.NET and C#, based in part on his earlier controversial J++.
The controvercy was based on tying Java too much to
the operating system. And .NET can be thought of as
OS-gnostic Java. Which may be thought of as vendor lock
on the one hand, but also making programs better citizens
in the running environment, thus better performance, etc.

There he talked about the rationale and advantages of
the managed approach. Unmanaged app when it starts running
says bye-bye to the operating system, and it becomes very hard
to track problems or see what's going on. 

Managed programs make it harder to write buggy programs,
such as memory leaks, index overruns, etc.
However, it makes it easy to write still too convoluted
programs which may become increasingly hard to maintain.
And the responsibility for managing external resources
and following some boiler plate API still remains, failing
which still would create hard maintenance issues.

Another issue with managed is memory bloat. I was
trying to run Oracle BPEL Process Manager, written 
in Java, and it just snaps close to 1Gb just to start.
But I guess this managed approach makes development
scalable over a number of developers of arbitrary
proficiency to get the job done.

That could be thought of the difference of tools
and approach between programing and software engineering.



 
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