--- Gilbert Carl Herschberger II <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Haven't you suffered poor quality software long
> enough? It is poor quality
> to build a platform that doesn't last. Java 1.1 is a
> platform. In spite of
> what Sun wants, that platform is going to be around
> for more than two
> years. People have invested heavily in Java 1.1.
> What gives Sun the right
> to throw all their customer's code away? Who's code
> is it anyway?
Hello,
IMHO, Java is much to immature for you to expect it to last unchanged
in its current form. It's going to continue to change in
non-compatible ways for many more years as people uncover problems and
generate fixes.
Look at any other programming language and you will see similar changes
during its formative years... Even a relatively mature language like
C++ just became standardized and many implementations still need to
change (in non-compatible ways) to support the standard. And let's not
even start with other languages like fortran that have gone through
MAJOR changes to stay alive. If java were to not evolve (and radically
so in the beginning) it would remain immature and practically useless.
In addition, as you point out, Java is more than just a language, its a
platform. So in many ways you must treat it like an operating system.
No one expects OS's to stay 100% backward compatible between versions.
And I've yet to see any OS that thought it was so well designed that it
didn't need to make changes that breaks some or all old programs
between versions.
I would full expect the first full rev of the JVM (when the
implementation goes from 1.x to 2.0) to actually change the VM spec.
using experience gained with the current VM. Probably something to use
some of those undefined byte codes for optimization or as an escape to
another byte code set for efficiency/speed/etc or introducing some
general purpose "registers"...
IMHO, Java is still very bleeding edge and you need to expect the
ground to constantly shift under you at a moment's notice... If you
like stability, you should probably stick with a more mature technology
like C on unix where changes are much more incremental. This is
definitely not to say that I don't want you working on JOS. I just
think your expectations of the technology are a bit high.
-iain
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