Paul G. Allen wrote:
Once a programmer has learned how to derive algorithms, decompose a problem, and all the other things Stewart mentioned, if he knows one complex language, he can learn another in a short time. It's basically a simple matter of learning a new syntax.
I think this is true for a certain class of programmers. I have, however, seen people who simply can't get their head out of the paradigm of a given language. Some can go that far, but have specific problems vaulting to a different "paradigm" (I can hear the screams now). OOP is close enough to procedural programming that a good chunk of programmers can make the leap, but I've seen a lot of the sorry cases who simply can't. Even more painful is watching people try to grok functional programming. Again, to some people it's no biggie, just a different way of tackling the same problems, and they move on. However, lots of them will just revolt against the notion of stateless programs.
efficiently. The "painfully slower" scenario applies to Sun's J2SE JDK runtime, which as you can imagine, isn't terribly optimized for "hello world" type programs. ;-)
Yes, most of the JVMs I deal with are Sun's own. I have put some interest
in IBMs JVM, but I didn't see any convincing reason to advocate it's use
over Sun's.
It has far better multi-platform support. It works better and more reliably under Linux. They usually release a JRE/JDK for the latest Java spec. before Sun does.
My experience has been that they release after Sun, but maybe that's just been unfortunate timing on my part. I will say I've found that the "better and more reliably under Linux" doesn't seem to be quite so true these days. Ever since JDK 1.4 Sun has devoted a lot of resources to making the JDK work well on Linux, and I'd say it's starting to really pay off.
--Chris
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