Re: Jobs
Re: Jobs
- Subject: Re: Jobs
- From: Jonathan Hendry <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 02:31:33 -0500
On Saturday, Nov 16, 2002, at 21:03 America/New_York, Steve Klingsporn
wrote:
Java is appropriate on the desktop and server sides. I don't think
Apple is going to do anything to "screw up" the Objective-C runtime
any more than it is already performance-challenged and in need of
hacks (that Apple keeps improving upon) like prebinding to be
acceptable.
The runtime isn't the problem, the problem is in the Foundation classes.
Prebinding isn't the fault of Objective-C, either. It wasn't needed on
NeXTSTEP. I
actually suspect it may have more to do with the integration of Cocoa,
Carbon and
the framework lasagna that is OS X.
<snip>
The people who tell us "Objective-C is just C with some additions for
OOP" are only partially telling the truth, because when you get right
down to it, Objective-C code is not truly very
portable unless Objective-C is the target on the platform you are
moving to...
Strawman. When people say that about Objective-C, the point isn't about
portability, it's
about ease of learning. People bitch and moan about learning
Objective-C as if
it was like learning Sanskrit.
Maybe Objective-C will take off, and I hope it does, but Java wins
in the popularity contest.
Maybe, but Java performance still isn't very good on the desktop. Nor
is Java very
popular for desktop apps. One of my favorite apps (Britannica) is Java
based. It's
nice that Java allows it to run on Windows and OS X, but it's not that
fast. The
2003 version, in fact, is unusably slow on my iBook, and just plain
slow on my
1.2GHz athlon. (It ought to get better next year.)
I also found JBuilder to be unusably slow on my iBook and too slow for
comfort
on my Athlon.
Give Cocoa-Java a try. It truly is "Java on the Desktop."
If you are looking for a Cocoa job, you should be thrilled, because
this will open up a whole new world of possibilities...
No it doesnt. Nobody's hiring people to write Mac code. Cocoa-Java code
is Mac code,
because nobody else has the Cocoa Java APIs.
(Actually, the Cocoa/Java API's are less cross-platform than
Cocoa/Objc, because
at least some Cocoa/ObjC APIs are available in GnuStep. Nobody, AFAIK,
is
doing Cocoa/Java on other platforms.)
You can, for instance, use JDBC with Cocoa to create native
front-ends for databases and the like. This is really great stuff,
and I'm sure that there is nothing to fear with regards to > performance.
You don't need Cocoa/Java APIs to do that, as you well know.
Don't judge Java on the desktop based on AWT or Swing. They are the
least-common-denominator monsters that they are, and agreed -- one of
the main reasons Java hasn't taken off on the desktop.
Also the fact that Java apps are memory hogs and a bit slow. I actually
quite like
the Britannica 2002 UI (2003 not so much).
All the classpath crap doesn't help. jar hell is no fun.
Double-clickable applications
took a while to appear, which can't have helped.
The early versions of Java were also hampered by excessive
threadsafety. The
ex-NeXT guys at Netcode wrote a class framework (later Netscape's IFC)
in
which a nice performance boost came from making non-threadsafe
collections.
That's been retained in Swing, you now have the option of threadsafety.
(Netcode also had an IB-like UI builder which saved UI's in nib-like
files.
Damn shame it was thrown out by Netscape & Sun.)
Just remember that your computer doesn't know if it's a desktop
machine or a server machine, and the line is blurring in Mac OS X and
other Unix-based OS's.
Nonsense. Java is good on the server because the way Java apps are run
on the
server is fundamentally different from the usage pattern on a desktop.
That's
why j2EE apps are architected extremely differently from desktop
applications.
The next step is believing that it truly is, as Joe Palmer wrote
(BeBox author) "Dark inside the box." If we embrace x86, the world
will be a much better place. This is not just an opinion. You can
only fight an uphill battle for so long before you find your army
littered about it.
I'm all for switching to an x86-ish processor. Or, rather, switching
*back* to
x86. Objective-C will have no problem making the leap, so I'm not sure
what your point is here.
--
Jonathan W. Hendry NeXTSTEP/OpenStep/Cocoa
email@hidden programmer in Connecticut
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| | >Re: Jobs (From: Steve Klingsporn <email@hidden>) |