On 2/23/02 5:15 PM, "Dave Thomas" <Dave / PragmaticProgrammer.com> wrote:

> One last thought. Many (the majority?) of server-side web applications
> are currently being written in the COBOL of the New Millennium, Java.
> And Java uses garbage collection to dispose of objects. Seems to work
> fine for these applications. C# (and the clr) use garbage collection
> too. It seems to be with us to stay.

But Dave, Java's GC notoriously sucks. I know from personal experience that
it sucked up to 1.1.8. I was one of those people who got caught in trying to
use it for a real desktop app. Fortunately we figured out pretty early that
the GC was a non-starter, got confirmation from Sun that Java wasn't up to
what we wanted to do and changed to C++. You have to manage memory yourself
there but there are great tools to help so it's not as hard as everybody
seems to think.

Later I heard that GC got better in Java 2. I had a chance to talk to one of
the JBuilder programmers about whether they were relying on it. He said, "We
do all our own memory management in JBuilder."

The hasn't kept Java from becoming, as you say, the COBOL of the New
Millennium, but it sure kept Corel from succeeding with their Java office
suite. Java seems to be stuck in the middleware space, where it does pretty
well.

Now I've been going under the assumption that Ruby was good where Java is Ok
and would probably be inappropriate where Java is not so good. I make the
same assumption about C#.

Am I way off base here?
-- 

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have
commentators. -Albert Camus, writer and philosopher (1913-1960)