Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Language wars silliness OK, I am not sure why I am wading into this, but the language wars of Smalltalk vs. Java vs. etc. are plain silly. In my opinion, people who are good Lisp or Smalltalk programmers are definitely a little more productive in cranking out code. No arguments there. However, Java (with all its language warts) has some awesome things going for it: Soon, there will be more Java enabled smart phones and PDAs than PCs. Want to get in on this market? If you write a system for someone, don't you want the warm feeling that they can find Java programmers to maintain it? Java programmers are plentiful - this is a good thing! Java rules the server side. While some Smalltalk environments like VisualWorks have absolutely awesome web services support, the quality of free Java server side tools like Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, Enhydra application server (not to mention many good, but expensive commercial products) make Java's use on the server a no-brainer. As per item 2, if you design and implement a Java based web application, don't you want to feel confident that your customer can find people to modify and maintain it? Using one language for all granularities of devices: OK, so I am repeating point 1 here, but it seems efficient to be able to use one language (and similar J2ME/MIDP, J2SE, J2EE platforms) for development. Now, some people might argue about how good Microsoft's .Net is. No argument here - VisualStudio.Net is almost scary how easy it makes things to crank out web applications. But, do you want to be locked into Microsoft? With Java, we have Sun, IBM, Apache organization, Oracle, SAP, etc. that are fully committed to Java. Seems safer than relying just on Microsoft. 2:43:44 PM

© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson. Last update: 9/14/03; 9:51:52 AM.