[Noise] Re: Java

[s1113645 at tesla.cc.uottawa.ca]

On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> Who said anything about C, Detweiler. Smalltalk. Scheme. Postscript. 
> There are dozens of them out there. All of them are totally machine
> independent. You could run Smalltalk images byte for byte identical on
> large numbers of different processors years and years and years
> ago. Byte codes aren't new either -- Smalltalk's virtual machine, PSL
> and others had them decades ago.

One thing that might distinguish Smalltalk's comparative market faliure from 
Java's apparent market success, apart from the hype, is the lack of a 
free implementation for windows or even an easy to use free version for 
dos (both of the dos ones I tried failed to work for some reason).

A good free class lib for net programming and GUI programming would have
helped too (something more substantial than the windowing primitives it
comes with). Java has all these things. (One thing that detractors of
Smalltalk claim is that it is slow--slower than Java. However there is a
research dialect from Sun called Self which is supposed to be 50% as fast
as C.)

Also if one looks on the commercial side of things, developper versions
(which are wonderful) are much more expensive than the equivalent visual
basic (having purchased and tried a cheaper smalltalk for a course, I
would have far preferred staying with it rather than c++ or VB. Hopefully
Java does what it couldn't. However it is never too late, there is always
market for very easy to learn and program OO languages that aren't c++.
If you care so much Perry, you could always give it a try.)