Erlang vs. Java

[Ewan Higgs]

DPI is a bizarre way to describe screen resolution.
It's a printer resolution term and people who can
judge what size that is. (For the benefit of people
reading along: 90 DPI is the resolution of a dot
matrix printer -so pretty poor).

Shall we assume you are legally blind and running
640x480 with large fonts? If that is the case then
saying the design is flawed looks a bit strong for
most people reading this list, I imagine. It might be
more useful to have described your issues with the
page in the context of your challenges. This way, you
won't leave Joel to read the site you linked to and
scratching his head as his page conforms to everything
on all the top 10 lists of good things to do and
breaks none of the rules on the top 10 lists of what
not to do.

Arguing that you don't want to download a new browser
every month is a garbage strawman argument.

>     > That is *not* java.
> 
> It *isn't* Java, but it *uses* Java.

This is a very useful point in context of the recent
discussion on this list about trying to make Erlang in
conjunction with Lisp and Prolog a viable solution for
developing projects. The problem was that C++ has so
much political weight that it trumps other languages.
One of the reasons given was that using several
languages will leave the programmers in a weird
situation of having to struggle with different
syntaxes and tool chains. What a mess!

However, Java is also politically successful - and
yet, as you describe, people using it are using loads
of mini languages with it to get their work done in
spite of the adversity of the language! How's that
then? (not directed at only you, but put to everyone).

Also interesting is how Java is then criticized for
not being that great since you have to use so many
mini languages to get anything done. Though it seems
the SmugLispWeenies are the ones doing this. That's
weird since TheWayToDoIt for a lot of projects in Lisp
is to write code in a minilanguage and then write an
interpreter for that code.

While we're on the topic of Java, I was wondering how
Java fit into the discussion Boehm reopened in his
recent paper, "Threads Cannot be Implemented as a
Library":
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.html

Does Java suffer from the issues Boehm says of
pthreads? He says it does in the introduction that
since they are described in the language specification
that it doesn't nessesarily apply, but also that
specifying such behariours are very difficult. He
leaves it ambiguous over whether Java has been
successful in helping programmers to model
concurrency.

I think it's on topic for this list as Erlang is
probably the leading concurrent language, so getting
an idea for how other languages do things is fairly
relevant. If it isn't on topic, just say so.

Warm Regards,
Ewan


		
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