Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writing college books]

[michaelslists at gmail.com (mikeiscool)]

On 11/14/06, Crispin Cowan <crispin at novell.com> wrote:
> mikeiscool wrote:
> > On 11/14/06, Leichter, Jerry <leichter_jerrold at emc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The joke we used to make was:  The promise of Java was "Write once,
> > > run everywhere".  What we found was "Write once, debug everywhere".
> > > Then came the Swing patches, which would cause old bugs to re-appear,
> > > or suddenly make old workaround cause problems.  So the real message
> > > of Java is "Write once, debug everywhere - forever".
> > >
> > > Now, I'm exagerating for effect.  There are Java programs even quite
> > > substantial Java programs, that run on multiple platforms with no
> > > problems and no special porting efforts.  (Hell, there are C programs
> > > with the same property!)  But there are also Java programs that
> > > cause no end of porting grief.  It's certainly much more common to
> > > see porting problems with C than with Java, but don't kid yourself:
> > > Writing in Java doesn't guarantee you that there will be no platform
> > > issues.
> > True, but that doesn't mean runtime portability isn't a good thing to aim for.
> It means that compromising performance to obtain runtime portability
> that does not actually exist is a poor bargain.

Runtime portability _does_ exist and the perfomance argument is old
and outdated now, there's the hotspot compiler that can beat the lazy
programmer (and aren't we all lazy?) and, although it's not java, you
may note Raymond Chens' optimisation challenge[1] with C# and C++ and
the results and discussion resulting.

And of course there are other reasons aside from just the runtime
portability to use Java; it's rich API, and so on.

-- mic
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/10/416151.aspx