On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Ken Chang wrote:
> why should people write programs in Java when we have C++?
Because C++ is a disaster of a language, that's full of traps and
pitfalls for the unwary or non-expert users?
When I hire developers, I want them writing programs, not trying
to figure out obtuse pointer syntax or keep track of their memory
allocations. (A language without automatic memory management is a
complete joke, these days. [Well, it has been since the 70s, actually,
but there you go.])
> for the majority of developers, better support with free sample
> codes can make the transition smoother.
Not really. Sample code is dead easy to write. That's about 15% of the
job, if that. Production code integrated into the rest of your system
and tested is maybe three times as hard, or say another 50% of the job.
The last 35% is build and release engineering.
> ...but the initial efforts will
> be paid off if you do have good flexible design optimized for
> mobile users.
Assuming you're still in business. We ended up buying a couple of our
competitors quite cheaply because they couldn't keep up with the rate at
we were releasing features. After we bought them I read some of their
code, though, and it was very nice. I felt a bit bad about throwing it
all out. :-)
What you don't seem to realize, Ken, is that, at least between about 1995
and something approaching the present, business success was all about
speed. The folks who got something half-assed out there before someone
else got something good out there were the winners. That may offend your
sense of technical aesthetics, but that's reality.
(As an aside, it really used to offend my sense of technical aesthetics,
too, until I discovered techniques to keep some semblance of order and
cleanliness in a very fast moving environment. Now I'm only moderately
offended by that strategy. And now, often, I'm more often offended by
the over-design that geeks produce than the chaos that the business
folks produce. I've seen way, way too many people design for what they
think the situation will be five years in the future, only to discover
that everything's changed three years later, and a lot of their design
criteria are now completely inapplicable. I think that the whole WAP/WML
thing is a perfect example of that. Why on earth do you need WAP when
you've got a low-latency 384 Kbps link?)
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Mar 29 19:31:49 2004