On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 10:24:16AM +1300, Christopher Sawtell wrote:
In other words:- Java lacks. Period. imho, There are much better languages into which to invest your time.
such as pike :-) my petpeve with java is that it never delivered on that "write once run anywhere" promise. compare this to python, pike and similar languages which are always distributed by source, which actually do run anywhere because there is only one implementation of the language runtime, and that despite them being free software (sun doesn't make java free because it fears incompatible forks, and as a result it gets incompatible rewrites, go figure)
I don't think Python is any more "run anywhere" than Java. Perhaps even less so. There are still differences in the Python runtime environment between operating systems. And Jython (which uses Java as its operating system) has its own quirks as well. Then there is stackless python (which I know next-to-nothing about). I suspect the differences between platforms are even greater with Python than with Java.
We (my work) develop a Java application which is quite complicated. Bother server and client parts work on UNIX/Mac/Windows. It hasn't been that difficult, really. Certainly no more difficult than it would have been in Python, I expect (from the point of view of getting it working reliably on all platforms).
Both Python and Java are worlds ahead of C and C++ in terms of source code transportability.
Cheers, Carl.
