Java and Python have quite different characteristics. Java is sophisticated language. It takes a longer time to learn Java than Python. With Java, you have to get used to the compile-edit-run cycle of software development. Python is a lighter-weight language. There is less to learn to get started. You can hit the ground running when you have only a few days of Python training under your belt. Python and Java can be used in the same project. Python would be used for higher level control of an application, and Java would be used for implementing the lower level that needs to run relatively efficiently. Another place where Python is used is an extension language. An example of that is Object Domain, a UML editing tool written in Java. It uses Python as an extension language.
--Guido von Rossum
Read the rest in Linux News - searchEnterpriseLinux.com: The Linux Specific Search Engine
Project planning in the first decade of the 21st century is about as accurate as medical diagnosis in the first decade of the 11th century. Sometimes we get it right -- generally by accident -- but usually our treatments do more harm than the original disease.
--David Megginson on the xml-dev mailing list
Tux is an excellent proof of concept of the whole rationale behind open source and free software development. Release your creation to the community, let them do with it as they see fit, and you'll end up with something wonderful.
--Marco Pastore
Read the rest in The Story Behind Tux the Penguin
Many people imagine Java is slow because it generates interpreted bytecode rather than native code. This used to be true, but not any longer with today's just-in-time compilers. Raw code execution speed is usually almost as good as -- sometimes better than -- the equivalent code written in a compiled language such as C.
Where Java can have a problem is with memory allocation. Unlike C and C++, Java takes care of memory itself, using a garbage collector to free unwanted objects. This brings great convenience to the programmer, but it is easy to create programs that are profligate with memory: they thrash due to excessive use of virtual memory, or they place great strain on the garbage collector due to the frequency with which objects are allocated and released.
Some coding techniques minimize the memory-allocation problems. For example the use of StringBuffer objects rather than Strings, use of pools of reusable objects, and so on. Diagnostic tools can help the programmer determine when to use those techniques. Getting the code fast does require a lot of tuning, but that is arguably still much easier than using a language such as C++, in which you must manage all the memory allocation manually.
--Michael Kay
Read the rest in developerWorks : XML : Anatomy of an XSLT processor
Don't run Outlook and you won't have a problem. Don't run Windows and you REALLY won't have a problem. Virus writers aim their work where it can have the greatest effect, which means Linux users running some freeware POP3 e-mail program will probably never be hurt. But that's not the way things work in industry, where the byword is standardization, which is to say "Kick me." No, it says "Kick us all, please."
If, as a systems administrator, you don't want to support more than one e-mail program in your organization, that's fine. Just make the e-mail program you do support one that isn't very popular. The standard here isn't Outlook, which in itself means nothing, it's POP-3 or SMTP, or IMAP. There are hundreds of good e-mail clients, some of them even better than Outlook. Remember your Mom asked, "If all your friends drove on the wrong side of the road, would you do it too?" If all the other kids use Outlook, will you use it too? Wise up. It's not that Outlook is bad, just that using it makes us victims.
--Robert Cringely
Read the rest in I, Cringely | The Pulpit
The "new" National Security Agency threw out a security-enhanced version of the Linux 2.2 kernel (called SE Linux ) into the open source community. Not only that, they gave out background briefing papers on the research methodology that they used to model whether or not SE Linux was truly secure.
If you haven't been following the cryptography area lately, let me assure you that this action by the NSA was the crypto equivalent of the Pope coming down off the balcony in Rome, working the crowd with a few loaves of bread and some fishes, and then inviting everyone to come over to his place to watch the soccer game and have a few beers. There are some things that one just never expects to see, and the NSA handing out source code along with details of the security mechanism behind it was right up there on that list. Up to this point, the NSA has embodied in itself the classic Cold War paranoia imperative of the past 50 years ("If you knew what we knew, you'd agree with us"). To see it spewing source like some long-haired Stanford student was enough to make for uncontrollable twitching.
--Larry Loeb
Read the rest in developerWorks : Security : Uncovering the secrets of SE Linux - Part 1
C++ never had the backing of a major vendor. Every major vendor pushes -- and always pushed -- some proprietary language over C++. C++ never had marketing clout; where marketing was done, it was mostly done by organizations selling something else (such as a software development environment) that happened to include C++. Also, the C++ community suffers from the very success of C++: It is clearly "the one to beat" and in today's heavily commercialized world, a fair fight is a rarity.
--Bjarne Stroustrup
Read the rest in An interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
The Free Software Movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community, and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software.
--Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in News: The GNU GPL and the American Way
I think that any language that aspires to mainstream use must provide a broad base for a variety of techniques -- including object-oriented programming (class hierarchies) and generic programming (parameterized types and algorithms). In particular, it must provide good facilities for composing programs out of separate parts (possibly writing in several different languages). I also think that exceptions are necessary for managing the complexity of error handling. A language that lacks such facilities forces its users to laboriously simulate them.
--Bjarne Stroustrup
Read the rest in An interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
No license can stop Microsoft from practicing "embrace and extend" if they are determined to do so at all costs. If they write their own program from scratch, and use none of our code, the license on our code does not affect them. But a total rewrite is costly and hard, and even Microsoft can't do it all the time. Hence their campaign to persuade us to abandon the license that protects our community, the license that won't let them say, "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine." They want us to let them take whatever they want, without ever giving anything back. They want us to abandon our defenses.
But defenselessness is not the American Way. In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL.
--Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in News: The GNU GPL and the American Way
Corporate IT is currently plagued by a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder known as DUH, or Dementia Upgradia Habitua. It manifests itself through the irrational assumption that the only way a company can maintain a competitive edge in productivity is to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware and software. Since hardware and software are continually changing (change is almost always considered to be progress, of course), DUH compels corporate IT to remain in a continual state of upgrade.
DUH may afflict anyone from the lowliest grunt to the most senior manager. Regardless of where it afflicts your organization, I have come to the sorry conclusion that DUH is almost always incurable. The philosophy "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" may make perfect sense to most people who hear it, but few IT departments are allowed to live by it even if they want to.
--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in Make Debian the base standard
I view Open Source as a form of enlightened self interest. Just how many times does the industry need yet another NE2000 driver for example? How many C++ compilers do we really need (trick question... the answer is zero :-) ).
--Gary Hughes on the WWWAC mailing list
Casually including Microsoft in the same aspersion as made against Sun was partially inaccurate. Sun's sins I could count if I had reason to. Microsoft's no one can. So I get lazy. (Not that I could count my own sins if I had to. ;-> )
--Joel Rees on the Unicode mailing list
The idea that there is one right way to solve essentially every problem for essentially every user is fundamentally wrong. I'm a great fan of the idea of object-oriented programming and the design ideals and techniques that it supports -- originating with Simula 67. However, those are not the only effective techniques. Much programming is best done with techniques that do not fall within a narrow definition of "object-oriented." And if you broaden the definition of "object-oriented" sufficiently for it not to be an obstacle to good programming and design, you get something that is basically meaningless.
--Bjarne Stroustrup
Read the rest in
An interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
I'd done a bit with Java in the early alphas, some pretty silly graphics that would have worked better if I had a clue about trigonometry. I was applying for jobs, and that bit of Java got me into three interviews. None of them panned out, but my favorite part was when I asked the interviewer what kind of Java work they were actually doing. His answer: "Well, none right now, but we think it's likely someday and we don't want to have to pay for training."
--Simon St.Laurent on the XHTML-L mailing list
It may be very difficult to say, "What I want to do is to interconnect these parts." With Jini we said, "We're going to describe the parts as Java types," because in the end the actions and the data formats that they're going to interconnect with have to interoperate. That was basically the equivalent of designing guns with interchangable parts. For the military that makes a huge difference. But it's still relatively brutal in that it's mechanically engineered, as opposed to biological systems. Biological systems are designed in a way that is more tolerant of misalignment. Things in an engineering sense have to be machined to be very precise. But when you try to make parts that are machined that are more biological, you fall off the end of computer science, basically. We don't know how to do that yet. We don't know how to describe systems in a more flexible way.
--Bill Joy
Read the rest in OpenP2P.com: A Conversation with Bill Joy [Feb. 13, 2001]
Computing began with lambdas, and lambdas are still the cleanest form of computing. While other programming models succumb to hideous complexity in the presence of such real-life inconveniences as parallel processing, asynchronous events and chaotic problem spaces, lambdas never lose their essential elegance.
--Uche Ogbuji on the xsl-list mailing list
One thing I would say, though, about peer-to-peer is that the real trend here is optical networking. It's going to provide us with almost unbelievable bandwidth. You know, to the extent that it's optically switched, the photons really do go in one end and drop out the other. It's not really even packet-switched; it's circuit-switched. And that provides you with what you might call cross-sectional bandwidth. You know, the sum of all the point-to-point bandwidth is just huge, and that provides an opportunity for connecting machines in a way that is much more powerful than they have in the past.
--Bill Joy
Read the rest in O'Reilly Network: A Conversation with Bill Joy [Feb. 13, 2001]
The patent bar has been lowered so far you can trip over it if you're not watching.
--Perry Leopold
Read the rest in Winner 1
The most important thing about Windows XP is that it replaces a "toy" operating system ‹ Windows 9X ‹ with technology designed for reliability and robust performance, the Windows NT/2000 kernel. Putting this technology into a consumer OS is the key to everything else.
--David Coursey
Read the rest in Windows XP: 10 things to know
The important thing to remember about yesterday's decision is that people are using Napster not because they don't know that its illegal but because they don't care. As with Prohibition or the 55 mph speed limit, laws which face massive uncoordinated civil disobedience can fail even if they are buttressed by unassailable legal arguments.
--Clay Shirky on the Computer Book Publishing mailing list
when designing a language^* if over half the potential users can't do XXX without help, it is probably an indication that there is a feature missing somewhere. You could do everything with a finite alphabet a finite set of rules and an infinitely long tape, but it can get tedious. Sometimes "convenience" features makes all the difference.
--David Carlisle on the xsl-list mailing list
Encryption and export control laws are out of control. Encryption is all about helping honest people protect their information from bad people.
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in Sun to Fed: Don't Settle With MS
Even though Java is more than fast enough on modern hardware for all but the most demanding applications, there's still this weird perception that it's too slow for "real work". I find this bizarre given how extensively Linux programmers use even slower scripting languages, often for non-trivial purposes, and no one complains about performance.
--Lou Grinzo
Read the rest in Welcome to LinuxProgramming.com!
Why is UNIX so much better than its interface? Because, its designers were experts at the theory and practice of software design and development. They were not experts at cognitive psychology, and the field of interface design barely existed when they were designing it. Now that we know a significantly more, it is time to fix the mistakes that they (understandably) made.
--Jef Raskin
Read the rest in osOpinion: Tech Opinion commentary for the people, by the people.
If you remember Visual Basic in 1990 and what it did to Windows in getting mainstream applications onto the desktop, this is what Kylix will do for Linux. This is going to make an explosion of applications in Linux.
--Gent Hito, N Software Inc.
Read the rest in
PC Week
Marketers are like dogs: They jump up on top of you and try to lick you everywhere, and it's just painful to have to ward them off at every corner. Surfers are an individually minded lot, so the marketers are using browser technology to extend and exploit that attention in ways that really annoy the consumer.
--Jason Catlett, Junkbusters
Read the rest in Media - Tech News - CNET.com
When people have problems using a design, it's not because they are stupid. It's because the design is too difficult.
--Jakob Nielsen
Read the rest in Are Users Stupid? (Alertbox Feb. 2001)
Individuals are in some ways signing over their Fourth Amendment rights by opening up their computers. It's too bad that to protect people's privacy, they have to pay extra.
--Ari Schwartz, Center for Democracy and Technology
Read the rest in Tech News - CNET.com
The problem with Java is that Sun has repeatedly fumbled its strategic handling of Java as a platform. It is doing so even now in the world of open source. Sun just doesn't know how to embrace the open source community, and that's hurting Java as Linux quickly penetrates the server market. Sun has to face the fact that it desperately needs Linux, both as the platform for Java servlets and as an underlying operating system for Java-enabled embedded devices.
I suspect that the problem boils down to a fierce struggle within Sun, and it all starts with the issue of Solaris versus Linux. How could a company so proud of its regal Solaris operating system possibly consider replacing it with something so uncouth as Linux? I can actually sympathize with the engineers in that respect. It's hard to dedicate your work to something for years then have it threatened by an upstart from the street. I'm certain that Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics have the same inner conflicts. I would be willing to bet that Bruce Perens, who now works for HP, spends more time evangelizing Linux to HP employees than to HP customers.
--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in Java's future lies with Linux
APL is a long time member in good standing of that elite but not small club, the Club of Superior Languages. At this very moment, in New York City, Tokyo, Bombay, Paris, and Tuva, APL, J, and K programs are computing the precise methods to take money from those investors ignorant of these powerful languages.
--Jay Sulzberger on the lxny.org mailing list
Sun has to quickly decide whether it wants to be a hero to the open source community, or a threat. So far Sun has taken only a baby step with Open Office. That's wonderful, but it is not nearly enough. Source code for office productivity software is becoming a dime a dozen. What Linux really needs is a Java that runs fast and flawlessly, and is open source in such a way that the Linux developers embrace it. And Sun needs to overcome its obsession with Solaris so that it can compete with the likes of IBM when Linux starts to take over the world.
--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in Java's future lies with Linux
Microsoft is doing what Sun is desperately trying to prevent them from doing. If you've got Java code and you want to .NET-ify it, you've got a way to do it. It looks to me like Microsoft's lawyers have done another brilliant job of doing a fake left, run right. It looks like Microsoft has totally blindsided Sun. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sun litigate this one, but I'm not sure that it will get anywhere.
--William Zachmann, the Meta Group
Read the rest in MS Goes After Java Geeks
If you have important medical documents, the last place you want them is in your house. You want them out on the network where you can access them from anywhere. You want them where the appropriate people can get at it if they need to, if you're lying by the side of the road.
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in Sun CEO: There's safety in networking - Tech News - CNET.com
We're very pleased with this. It protects our customers and current products, since they are not impacted by the settlement. This affirms our right to independently develop technologies,
--Jim Cullinan
Read the rest in Sun and MS Settle Java Suit
The joke of the day over here was, "Did the janitor shut off the same light switch in the closet again?" and "Did the temp trip over that cord again?" It was either laugh or puke. Some of us did both.
--Anonymous Microsoft technician
Read the rest in Microsoft Crashes: The Fallout
Sun was afraid Microsoft would do a better job implementing Java on Windows than they could in implementing it on Solaris, so Sun's message became, "If you want to do Java, do it on Unix." It resulted in a scorched-earth scenario. Java ended up losing more than Windows. But no one really won.
--Will Zachmann
Read the rest in Enterprise Computing - Tech News - CNET.com
Microsoft is very pleased with the successful conclusion of this litigation. This settlement will not impact our customers or current products in any way and will allow us to focus our time and resources on what we do best: developing great software.
--Tom Burt, deputy general counsel for
litigation at Microsoft
Read the rest in Yahoo - Microsoft Reaches Agreement to Settle Contract Dispute With Sun Microsystems
It's pretty simple: This is a victory for our licensees and consumers. The community wants one Java technology: one brand, one process and one great platform. We've accomplished that, and this agreement further protects the authenticity and value of Sun's Java technology.
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in 01/23/01 - SUN AND MICROSOFT SETTLE LAWSUIT; SETTLEMENT PROTECTS INTEGRITY OF JAVA PLATFORM
Java has made little headway on the desktop. That trend is clearest -- and, to me, most disappointing -- in the area of standard productivity software.
By 1997 or so, at least three of the world's largest and most experienced application developers -- Oracle, IBM's Lotus division and Corel, publisher of the WordPerfect Office -- had announced plans to create and market Java-based suites with the usual Office components: word processing, spreadsheets, personal-information management and more. All three hoped to take on the formidable Microsoft Office.
Not one of these efforts came to fruition. Lotus and financially strapped Corel officially shelved their projects; I'm not sure what ever happened to Oracle's, but it doesn't seem to exist today.
--Henry Norr
Read the rest in ThinkFree Delivering on Java's Promise
Java has a lot of flaws, many of which can be traced to Sun's marketing department (the elevation of JSP to a standard part of their platform is near the top of my list). They spew out specs faster than programmers can implement them, then deprecate them and replace them with something else. They've refused to standardize.
--Kyle F. Downey on the wwwac mailing list
Just at the level of taste and aesthetics, it's astounding that anybody could vote for this man at the start of the 21st century. But then again, his opponent's act was like a pig trying to be a chameleon. Gore's maneuvers were so pathetically opaque that one almost wanted to weep for him.
The big topic now is whether the Bush presidency will be legitimate. I've never granted any of them much legitimacy anyway, considering the process -- the compromises, the exploitation of friends and supporters, the money, and the horseshit one must at least pay lip service to in order to achieve that position of presidential candidate within the major parties.
So unfortunately, I can only measure the legitimacy of a president in terms of him being the country's biggest star. Can he pull it off? Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton were able to pull it off with charisma, and Nixon did it with Shakespearean pathos. I don't think Bush stands a chance. His much-touted charm is Grade B at best.
In terms of politics, well, he'll be even more of a tool of big money and particularly of big oil than Clinton was, and economic policies will proceed accordingly. In other areas, I think how he'll play out is still up for grabs.
--R.U. Sirius
Read the rest in A Sirius View From the Fringe
It's important to understand that large enterprises cannot stop investing in this Interent technology. The Internet is still wildly underhyped and underutilized and underimplemented around the world. A bigger issue for us is keeping the power on here in northern California. That's the biggest challenge right now
--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in CNET.com - News - Enterprise Computing - Sun steers clear of computing slump
I hate Java. As a programmer, I hate Java, the language, for what it has done to the field of programming. As a journalist, I hate the relentless hyping of Java by its supporters, as well as their unending excuses as to why Java has failed to deliver. And as a technologist who has been involved with three major projects that have used Java, I hate the complications that Java has caused.
--Simson Garfinkle
Read the rest in Salon.com Technology | Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant
I've done a reorg every year that I've been here. I don't reorg defensively, I reorg offensively. Just as we get comfortable, I'll change things.
--Ed Zander, President of Sun
Read the rest in Forbes.com: Solar Power
The obstacle to the full embrace of Apple hardware has been the antiquated operating system. Honestly, I think Apple has been held hostage by its customers for far too long. Customers who insisted that the OS be backwards compatible to aging Macs with weak processors. Customers who on one hand said that "we want you to stay ahead of Windows," and on the other were unwilling to let Apple abandon the crumbling foundation of its OS in order to do so.
--Derrick Story
Read the rest in O'Reilly Network: Mac OS X Opens Apple to a New Audience
If you look at the macro trends, the cost of hardware is trending toward zero. The cost of network bandwidth is trending toward zero. And the cost of software is trending toward zero. Open source is accelerating those trends.
--Michael Tiemann, CTO Red Hat
Read the rest in CNET.com - News - Newsmakers - Red Hat CTO looks to make running Linux less of a chore
The bottom line is that if you are a skilled-enough programmer and a dedicated-enough person to wade through the docs and learn to use Java effectively, you are going to be just as effective in any of the other computer languages that people have been using in the last 30 years. If you weren't good enough to program in C or LISP or PL1 or Pascal, then you aren't good enough to program in Java.
--Philip Greenspun
Read the rest in Salon.com Technology | Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant
Since most software spends the majority of its lifecycle in maintenance, I would much rather inherit a well-written Java program that's 30% slower than a tweaked-out, unreadable C program with memory leaks!
--Kyle F. Downey on the wwwac mailing list
In my experience, applets can be a pain in the neck when you're trying to move beyond a certain level of functionality. For one thing, they limit you to having a live network connection in order to accomplish any work at all. For another, they create an additional dependence on a particular browser that is known to work with the applet. Safer to be independent of browsers than dependent on them. The Browser Wars may be over, but there are plenty of Browser Skirmishes still flaring up.
--Greg Guerin on the java-dev mailing list
But what will be the ultimate legacy of Java? The anti-Microsoft crowd said that Java would allow Sun to finally make inroads against Microsoft's dominance of the desktop. But in the final analysis, Java was nothing more than a ploy to capture the public's interest and, in so doing, boost Sun's stock price. And it worked marvelously. Java's introduction in 1995 marked the beginning of what was essentially a five-year climb in the price of Sun's stock: $1,000 invested in Sun on July 1995 would have been worth $18,535 at the close of trading on December 30th, 2000. Now that's the power of Java.
--Simson Garfinkle
Read the rest in Salon.com Technology | Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant
I think you have to rate competitors that threaten your core higher than you rate competitors where you're trying to take from them. It puts the Linux phenomenon and the Unix phenomenon at the top of the list. I'd put the Linux phenomenon really as threat No. 1.
--Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft
Read the rest in Techweb > News > Linux Vs. Windows > Ballmer: Linux Is Top Threat To Windows > January 10, 2001
We have this uncanny ability to seize disruptive technologies and just go maniacal on execution
--Ed Zander, President of Sun
Read the rest in Forbes.com: Solar Power
This technology doesn't belong in disk drives at all. I think consumers should have the right to control their own disk drives and what they put on them -- that control shouldn't be abrogated to the manufacturers of hard drives.'
--John Gilmore
Read the rest in Coalition makes concession on anti-piracy technology (1/04/2001)
In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as being a sure sign of incipient brain damage, Linus Torvalds (also known as the 'father of Linux' or, more commonly, as 'mush-for-brains') decided that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.
--Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in Vaporware? Ha! Linux 2.4 Arrives
Every time Sun does one of these announcements, I'm reminded that they have not been good at getting people to sign up in interesting volumes for the preceding pieces. Sun has lots of interesting ideas, but the sign-up has been thin
--Amy Wohl
Read the rest in CNET.com - News - Enterprise Computing - Sun sambas into Web-based software field with "Brazil"
JDOM is to Newton's Laws as DOM is to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Einstein's equations explain a broader range of physical behaviors, but they're so darn cumbersome that for earthbound requirements people use Newton's.
--Jason Hunter on the jdom-interest mailing list
When a distinguished but elderly statesman states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
--Arthur C. Clarke
Read the rest in Clarke: Wheeling Boldly Into 2001
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