From: "Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Personally, I wish people *would* switch from C/C++ to Java for application programming. Java has its problems, but I would never go back to C for applications programming. I would rather use C++, but very few people seem to know how to use C++ correctly (use the STL, dammit). Python requires non-standard extensions for OS threads (it has other faults, too). Perl has too many idioms and weak support for programming-in-the-large abstractions. Everything else is too small to consider for deployment to large chunks of programmers.Everything can start using Java when you start buying my hardware for me. Java is still, and likely will always be, a CPU and memory hog. Moore's law be damned- *my* hardware doesn't get any quicker every year.
As for the STL- there's a reason people don't use it. Its not easy to write, and even worse to maintain. It falls in under the realm of too clever. You can do a lot of work with it in very few lines of code, but its very difficult to understand or debug those lines. Its better to avoid using it and write more lines but end up with a clearer program. I personally tend to use C over C++ due to seeing way too many bad OO designs that decided they needed to use way too much inheretance and far too many classes because "its OOP".
To throw in my experience, the only language which gets even *remotely* close to being cross platform portable from a multimedia standpoint is Java. There is a reason why everybody uses Macromedia Director to ship multimedia apps on the web; all the other solutions suck (including Java, but Java is least bad)
Umm, you use a multimedia multiplatform library, and it all magicly works on whatever platform. Platform portability is a laughable argument- thats what libraries are for. You put the paltform differences in the library. There's good, multiplatform multimedia libraries out there for just about any language under the sun.
Bleh, dear god no. Java is bloated enough. Having everything under the sun part of the standard library and distribution is not a good thing. WHen you do that you get subpar libraries with lots of silly dependancies and ugly design.... sorta like Java's standard library.
I just wish the Java Multimedia Framework would actually become a base part of the distribution. Without JMF, there is just no hope for Java video (audio is okay--amazingly there are pure Java OGG Vorbis decoders).
Gabe
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