On Thu, 11 Feb 1999 01:54:39 -0500 schwerin@xxxxxxxx (Schwerin) wrote:
>Not hearing much love for java out there :( The main reason I bring it up
>is that would be the easiest for me to develop in at the time being. I'm
>using the mac and PC platforms so for me it's just obvious to write my
>"in-house" needs in java.
I've had more success doing cross-platform work with C (and oddly enough, FORTH,
for my embedded projects) than Java.... and keeping up with the matrix of
browser/java VMs that work is silly. I recall Applix(?) with the Java "Office"
suite ran successfully on fewer than 30% of the browser/VM combinations. (The
Linux people used that as a benchmark to show how fast Linux and the Java
"object" execution was... since the 166Mhz 32MB Linux system was toe-to-toe with
a 266Mhz 64MB NT box. But those were the only two which ran the product
successfully, even then, on the NT box, only with Internet Exploder.) So wither
this mythical cross-platform promise? More hype than substance.
>As for speed, how much speed do you need? A full IDE needs to be well
>built, I agree. But smaller tools need less perfection.
I stop ya right here. Some of us (hopefully more than 1 or 2) can whip up
complex tools in assembler as quickly as BASIC or some yah-yah "high level
language"... There is *NO* reason why the littlest things we do shouldn't be
done with care and attention to details and the user experience. Look around
you... the computer industry is rotting away in a sea of garbage because people
don't think it's important to write and sculpt correct code. There's no end to
this thought-progression of "xxx tools, routines, modules, systems, etc need
less 'perfection'..."
It takes only a LITTLE more time and effort, but it's always worth it. I ported
DASM to the Macintosh, for instance... a trivial thing since Matt wrote it
fairly well. I actually spent the time to fire up an old 68020 machine to make
it sure worked correctly.... sure... who uses 68020 machines anymore?
Probably noone. But why shouldn't it work? And if some poor sot with a 68k
machine downloaded it, and it failed to run, he'd be disappointed and
crestfallen, wouldn't he? It only took me an extra 10 minutes of my time... as
it turned out, my 680x0-tools are so mature, they almost never make booboos...
though I was mainly interested to see the runtime libs were ok.
People like me who learned coding by just spending hours with Z80 and 6502
machines like the Apple ][+, etc... respect resources and a correct design, even
if it's a dipshit program. Robert's Third Law of Software: EVERY single piece
of software you write will always have a longer lifespan than you anticipate it,
so write it carefully.
If people applied such principles to COBOL and DB programming back in the 50s
and 60s, Y2K would be a total non-issue... as it is, there is an entire cottage
industry build entirely upon the fears and unknowns of short-sighted design
principles and inferior coding practices.
> How fast do you need your 6K program to assemble?
I like it done as my finger comes off the ENTER key, actually. 0.2 seconds or
so. :P
> Are you willing to suffer some lag in a
>pixel editor if it saves you time writing asm data tables?
No way. No interactive "artistic" tool should make the user suffer lags and
burps in performance.
>Rest assured, on my 25 Mhz mac VM, I can tell when java is more like molasses.
>(It's garbage collection drives me crazy sometimes).
Rest assured, on my 120Mhz 604, Java is worse than Molasses moving downhill on a
freezing day.
I use Java mainly to simulate the effective speed of 1Mhz hardware on a
pipelined superscalar 120Mhz RISC CPU.
=Rob=
--
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
