NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c++-part2/17827

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 5.6 KB

Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!oxigen.demon.co.uk
From: Dirk Wessels <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Why C and C++ became widely used
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 96 21:19:47 GMT
Organization: O2
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: oxigen.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.30
X-Mail2News-Path: oxigen.demon.co.uk

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] "David Christie" writes:

> Alex Katz wrote:
> >
> > I think any advantages of Java over C++, real or imagined, do not necessarily
> > mean that it will begin to displace C++, unless those advantages address
> > directly the reasons that C and C++, unlike the vast preponderance of newly
> > developed languages, became widely used. And I do not see this thread
>  addressing
> > those reasons.
> >
> > Alex
>
> In priority order:
>
> 1.      Portability.  (Standard language definition.)
-- only valid for C or the supposingly next generation C++ compilers.
-- some platforms crash better than others
-- compilers have their own libraries.


> 2.      Portability.  (Wide availability on all platforms, early.)
-- All UNIX platforms ofcourse.
-- I have not seen any C++ compatability among MS-Windows yet!
   (of course MS keeps changing their standard as well)

> 3.      Portability.  (Just high level enough that you can write programs that
>                        run on different machine architectures without
>  sacrificing
>                        performance; as low-level a portable language as
>  possible.)

--Only valid for micro-processor that are optimised for C, and old compilers.
--The newest compilers convert all the low-level bits to high-level code,
  and than perform general optimisations. (optional for some compilers)
  Did you ever try to use the register key-word.
--portability only valid among 32 bit computers

>
> All other reasons pale by comparison.
>
> For Java, this is still number 1, 2, and 3, but there may be others:

(( I thought we were talking about C/C++, which is not Java))
(( I think everybody agrees with that, otherwise we will have to include
   many other C syntax languages: tcl, perl ))
-- why do you think the above stuff is valid for JAVA
  JAVA does not run under DOS or MSWindows?
-- microprocessors are not optimised for JAVA, but for C.
-- if there are more providers, the portability will stop very soon.
   (MS: ever tried Visual Basic 3 on Visual Basic 4).
-- Java is not a Standard (if MS gets his hands on it, it may never be).
-- Java has a 32 bit VM-code. In the near future INTERNET will go to
   128 bits! Computers will carry more than 4 Gigabyte addressing-space.
   Possibly they will provide conversion utilities, but with for example
   Smalltalk there will be no change.

>
> 4.      Self-delivering over the web.

-- just like Smalltalk now.
-- and there is not that much advantage with that, except that people
   have to keep paying to get rid of the latest bugs in the latest
   features.
-- does it include distributed garbage-collection, distributed processing
   saveties, run-time maintainance.

> 5.      Anti-virus security.
>
-- I thought you just said "Self-delivering", if anything works like
   that, it may be a virus. Virusses can be very subtile, like the
   MS-Word virus.
-- I just read the advice to run all applets in a separate user environment
   and why does nobody do that.
-- Is incompatability not a anti-virus security, used for Unix for a long
   time.
-- I look forward to hack into future JAVA mainframes, and let them-selves
   figure out the password that I am looking for.

> Note that for Java, "portability" means something more than it did for C and
>  C++.
> In the context of the web, "portability" means running on any web client, not
>  just
> on any operating system or hardware platform.  C and C++ are no longer portable > enough, as well as not satisfying (4) and (5).
>

I think there is too much hype. Java is a nice replacement for C++,
but it is not much better than Objective-C.

And why did Objective-C never gain much popularity?
I think this all has a lot to do with marketing and the just
risen Internet-hype.
History also repeats itself. About ten years ago, every computer had
some kind of BASIC on it. That was the standard, everybody used it
then, and you could actually display graphics on your ZX-Spectrum
The same would also work on the PC... everywhere. Even the mainframes
could work with that.
If we had HTML browsers, we would surely have had BASIC in them.
Now, only VB seems to have survived...
As time goes on everything changes, just face it. Java is now
promoted as the BASIC of the internet, and I think it has a reasonable
chance of becoming it, but does that make any big change?

We still have to solve problems in what-ever language. And for some
problems one language is better than the other, that is the reason
that there are so many. Fortran is still being used, as is C, Forth,
Assembler, as is Basic.

Java can be reasonable distributed, but does not have half the dynamics
of many other OO languages, like Smalltalk, Self, LISP,  ...
and possibly many more.
More dynamics, means easier to adapt to a changing environment.
And if you say, they won't change, than whay are you promoting JAVA in
the first place?




--
Dirk Wessels

e-mail: [e-mail]
OOA/ OOD/ Delphi/ Smalltalk/ C++/ CPU-design/ Maths/ Physics
---CENSORED---
<lines removed>