Thursday, March 11, 2004

Java as Baby Step. James Robertson thinks that Java is an interruption in the forward progress of software development. Itís nice to see this meme spread a bit; Iíve thought the same thing since 1996 or so. During ë95 and ë96, watching Java start to gain traction, I was amazed by the ignorance and ire surrounding many of what I considered Javaís best features: the virtual machine garbage collection methods "virtual" (in C++ parlance) by default a singly-rooted class hierarchy I came to view Java as a baby step that would serve primarily to soften up developersí attitudes toward these things, thus shortening the leap required to adopt even better languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, and their ilk. I donít think I was alone in believing that, but I didnít hear anyone else saying it for a while. It is nice to see people returning to serious language research again. Efforts like the Feyerabend Project and more practically focused offshoots like OOPSLAís Onward! track and the Post-Java Workshops (as well as increasing grass-roots interest in languages like Ruby, Haskell, Squeak, Oz, and even an ongoing Lisp revival) give me hope that weíll be ready to take a larger step soon. [Glenn Vanderburg: Blog] I'm with Glenn and James on this:  I think that Java's success was in part due to it's packaging of the features that Glenn listed above in a form that was easy for C developers to swallow.  All of those features had been around for years in various other languages, but those languages didn't resonate well with the general IT population for a variety of reasons.  Java acted as the sugar coating that made accepting those features fairly easy, but in my opinion Java has not added any significant new concepts to the world of programming languages.  It's time for something better. 10:38:07 AM     The great escape. Immediately after 9/11, dozens of Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family fled the U.S. in a secret airlift authorized by the Bush White House. One passenger was an alleged al-Qaida go-between, who may have known about the terror attacks in advance. Our first excerpt from "House of Bush, House of Saud." [Salon.com] I first came across this story while reading Michael Moore's Dude Where's My Country.  Basically a day or so after 9/11, when all civilian air traffic was shut down (and I was stranded in Houston), the Bush administration allowed a couple of private jets to fly all over the U.S. picking up Saudi royals and bin Landens and then take them overseas where they would be "safe".  A little odd considering that most of the 9/11 al-Qaida terrorists were Saudi citizens and a bin Laden holds the top spot within al-Qaida.  Seems like you would want to at least talk to those people to see if they had any useful info.  Of course, the Bush family has had very close personal and business ties to both the Saudi royal family and the bin Landen family for many years (read Moore's book for the full story).  It also raises the question of why this hasn't been covered more by the press? 10:18:45 AM     Job Scheduling in Java. Scheduling recurring execution of a piece of code is a common task for Java developers. The Timer class has its place, but as Dejan Bosanac explains, developers with more sophisticated requirements might want to check out the Quartz API. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 9:58:37 AM

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