"jos
...@corporate-world.lisp.de" <jos
...@lisp.de> writes:
> On 22 Okt., 12:06, Tim Bradshaw <t
...@tfeb.org> wrote:
>> On 2010-10-22 01:45:22 +0100, MarkHanif
...@gmail.com said:
>> > Great....now if I promise to buy a Mac can we get Dylan back?
>> If you buy a mac you will probably get, in due course, an entirely
>> closed appliance. Don't think deprecating Java is a good thing: it's
>> part of the process by which Apple are closing the system down.
> Apple is not deprecating Java, it is only deprecating their own
> distribution of it.
> Like on other platforms SUN/Oracle will have to provide it - or other
> vendors of Java implementations, like IBM.
they were going to put all their efforts into supporting openJDK now.
Essentially, anyone who is expecting Java to go away any time soon is
woefully mistaken. If anything, the increase in focus on openJDK by
major players will likely prolong its life.
Personally, this may be a good thing. While I hated using Java back in
the 1.0 and 1.1 versions and found the environment a major pain to
maintain, I have to say that more recent experiences as a result of
looking at clojure, indicate huge improvements. I still don't like Java
and still think it is an overly verbose and boring language to use with
too much bloat, but at least the environment has improved and getting
things setup and then maintaining them seems to have become far less
frustrating. This is good because there are some interesting things
happening on the jvm.
As an example, I recently wrote a very simple utility in clojure which I
was able to get deployed in our production environments with absolutely
no problems because it was just a jar file. A similar utility written in
CL was rejected on the grounds the admins were not prepared to maintain
a CL environment (a native executable was also rejected for other
largely political and ill-informed technical reasons). I was going to
try ABCL, but settled on clojure for no other reason other than I wanted
to try writing something in it. I also got past the most significant
bottleneck with CL - no available database access library that would
allow calling of stored procedures etc. Clojure, having access to the
java APIs allows the use of JDBC. (I suspect you might be able to do
something similar with ABCL as well).
While Java as a programming language is IMO limited, JVM as a deployment
platform has some very interesting possibilities. Languages like
clojure, scalar and even jRuby or jPython could mean that as
programmers, we may not be as constrained by management's concern over
enterprise environment maintenance and administration. While there would
always be the maintenance concern over anything used in production that
is written in a language only one person knows, being able to use one
deployment infrastructure is likely to provide some more freedom for
programmers.
Tim
--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
