At 7:51 AM 4/27/96, Dan Busarow wrote:
At Usenix 96 in San Diego it was pointed out that applets are an abberation. This is a complete language designed to displace C++, Visual Basic and other OO languages. Thinking of Java as simpy a Web enhancement tool is short sighted.
Personally it is more attractive than C++ for product development and we are trying to get it on FreeBSD, SCO UnixWare and SCO OSR5. Using Java for applets _only_ is like fucking your mother... Most of us are not into it.
Ignoring the gross violation of the CDA, I agree. I think of it (and so do a lot of others) as: - a cleaned-up C++, with features of Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Lisp - a tool with built-in hooks for Net-centric computing - some safety features that distinguish it from C++ and the like - a bytecode/virtual machine approach that means the same code can be run on any platform for which a VM exists (the key to applets, but also the key to portability...what the world might have looked like for the past 15 years has the UCSD p-system succeeded instead of MS-DOS) Is it safe to run untrusted applets on your machine? Probably not. Running strange programs probably is never safe. I don't view this as something any new language is likely to solve, unless it's a language with such limited expressability as to be "safe and boring." As Perry has noted, financial institutions can ill afford to have applets being dropped into their main computers unless they are safe and secure. Not too surprising. But, then, they also have other security issues they constantly have to deal with that others don't. I suspect the safety issues will continue to crop up, but will be dealt with in other ways. The signed classes approach, the approaches used in E, etc. Netscape's limits on what applets can do, for example, may be extended in other ways (a kind of firewall approach?). To borrow a viewpoint, I don't expect the Java-based gargoyles in "True Names" to be "trustworthy"...TANSTAAFL. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."