My experience has been that the hardcore C/C++ types who turn their noses up at Java will equally turn their noses up at .Net.
When I was learning .Net having a rudimentary knowledge of the Win32 API I could see how highly coupled a lot of .Net is to the underlying Win32 API's. The propaganda in some books I read on .Net implied that .Net was Microsoft's gift to the development world and that it was open and anyone to create an implementation blah blah. I thought logically that if Microsoft cared about any other platforms running .Net the APIs would not be so heavily coupled to Win32. I think that Mono would be forced to either leave out anything which simply does not exist on Linux or try and bend Linux to make it behave like Win32. To that end does anyone believe that the Win32 API is the glowing example of the best possible Operating System API system? If it is not then why should everyone's operating system bend to do things in a Win32 way? Java for all its faults is at least genuinely O/S neutral. This can be difficult sometimes when developers try and drill down to O/S specific functionality. One thing to note though which I have come across is that perhaps in this community many take for granted that people want to write software which runs on all platforms. Unfortunately a lot of people don't care about portability. If you don't care about running an application on anything other than Windows then is it easy to justify using Java? Many of the management who actually have the power to make decisions about platforms can say 90%+ of computers are running Windows so it is not worthwhile business wise caring about the other 10%. People like us hate this but from a logical business perspective I can see the logic. It is a self perpetuating problem that businesses keep writing Windows specific apps because it has the biggest market share. Because Windows is required to run so many apps then businesses and consumers feel forced to use Windows for compatibilities sake. For all of Java's write once run anywhere technology the status quo seems to be going strong. I hate it but it is a reality I am forced to live with. I wonder if anyone can break this catch 22 situation. For the many shrink wrapped client application developers who target Windows only I can see that .Net eases some of the Native pain the way Java has but still allows far more O/S specific clean integration than Java can easily do. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
