RE: Microsoft aflare

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed Feb 27 2002 - 06:41:15 MST


Hi,

I have my own views on J2EE which are not as negative as Samantha's
(my colleagues have used it to build some great bioinformatics products),
but all in all I guess this thread veers rather too far from SL4-ish
topics ... ;>

ben

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sysopmind.com [mailto:owner-sl4@sysopmind.com]On Behalf
> Of Samantha Atkins
> Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 2:06 AM
> To: sl4@sysopmind.com
> Subject: Re: Microsoft aflare
>
>
> The author of the article clearly has little idea what he is
> talking about. So far, .NET has not made significant inroads
> into corporate computing. J2EE has become a grab-bag of
> techniques with it central component pieces (EJB) quite painful
> to do real projects in. Neither the JVM or the .NET equivalent
> are that powerful. Both seriously constrain what can be done in
> languages built on top of them or compiling/translating down to
> them. Constraints that have some good points from the point of
> view of safety, especially with "average" programmers, are also
> constraints that prevent doing some very elegant and useful
> things at all or without a lot of kludges or becoming
> significantly more productive and producing software more
> well-tuned and maintainable than what is generally produced today.
>
> I was not at all happy to see .Net does not support free
> functions, or mutiple inheritance, or run-time typing (directly)
> or other models of program execution than convential C-Java
> stack models or ...
>
> In short it casts into stone a lot of common current
> mass-prejudice that is far from any real software wisdom.
> .
>
> As long as the software world runs on hype it will never begin
> to improve, much less begin to improve at anywhere near the rate
> of hardware. The world needs a new software panacea, a new
> software coporate bandwagon, like it needs a hole in the head.
>
> Object oriented technology is a great thing. I've been deeply
> into it since the days when the only people that showed up for
> conferences were a bunch of university people and assorted
> long-haired visionaries. BUT OO is not the best methodology for
> all types of software problems. Both .Net and Java act as if it
> is. This is a fundamental and unnecessary flaw.
>
> Gordon Worley wrote:
>
> > Looks like the boys at MS like what Eli is doing:
> >
> > http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-842922.html
> >
> > There's one real language, and then lots of `skins' that make the
> > language pretty to you (though maybe not anyone else). Hmm, I seem to
> > remember reading about this somewhere before ...
> >
>
>
> If the real language is seriously limited in some critical ways
> then the skins can't really fix it. They can make it seem like
> it is fixed on the surface but the performance and underlying
> implementation needed to make it happen will be truly dreadful.
>
>
> The idea of underlying base language and set of conventions to
> build underlying languages on has been around a very, very long
> time. It is not something new. There have been various
> attempts that failed in the market in various ways. Java has
> gotten farther than most (some 100 language implementations more
> or less have been made to rest on the the JVM). I salute
> actually having two of these base languages that are publicly
> acknowledged. But unfortunately, both dumb down what can be
> done (and how naturally it can be done) in languages that sit on
> top of them quite significantly. Both also limit the kind of
> tools than can be made to work directly at the base level by
> virtue of their designs.
>
> - samantha
>
>



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