3 ms·

Why does it matter if "anyone cares?" Nobody (generally speaking on the grand scale) is using LISP for much of anything. Same is true with Ruby, you'll be ha

Why does it matter if "anyone cares?" Nobody (generally speaking on the grand scale) is using LISP for much of anything. Same is true with Ruby, you'll be hard pressed to find a "serious" or "major" company actually shipping Ruby. You look in those terms and you have 2 options: C++ on Windows and Objective-C on Apple, those are the only interesting client app platforms that the "major players" are doing anything with. Maybe you throw .NET in to the mix but that looks a lot more like Windows-only 'java' for enterprise server apps than a client platform. I could see the concern about major player adoption being an issue of Java going away; that doesn't seem likely anywhere except maybe on Apple, even there I doubt it will happen until Oracle or another third party "takes over" the Java on OSX platform, I couldn't see it becoming completely unavailable. Now Java isn't great at doing the fancy platform integration, the Mac menu and windows tray support seem a bit fragile and the interest has been low enough that it doesn't have a ribbon menu and various modern animated UI components can be a lot of work in Java. Depending upon what you need the client app to do though it still seems like a totally viable platform. If it does what you need, what does any of the other stuff matter? Juniper's VPN client is in java.

axod 16y ago
> "Why does it matter if "anyone cares?"" Because some people are obsessed with what is 'fashionable' rather than what works to solve a problem.
nl 16y ago
Why does it matter if "anyone cares?" Because the future of the platform is important if you are betting an application on it. Now Java isn't great at doing the fancy platform integration, the Mac menu and windows tray support seem a bit fragile and the interest has been low enough that it doesn't have a ribbon menu and various modern animated UI components can be a lot of work in Java. Depending upon what you need the client app to do though it still seems like a totally viable platform. If it does what you need, what does any of the other stuff matter? It doesn't do what I need, and it's direction as a platform indicates that there is no point working on the things I need myself because then I'd have to support them for ever. For most of the major scripting languages (Ruby, Python etc) there are pretty decent libraries for platform integration, and they are being actively used by multiple developers. If I need to patch something then there is every chance that patch will be accepted back into a broadly used library. With Java, the ecosystem of client side developers isn't very large, and there aren't any big companies putting resources into it either. It's just stagnant, and that isn't good enough.

axod 16y ago

> "Why does it matter if "anyone cares?"" Because some people are obsessed with what is 'fashionable' rather than what works to solve a problem.

nl 16y ago

Why does it matter if "anyone cares?" Because the future of the platform is important if you are betting an application on it. Now Java isn't great at doing the fancy platform integration, the Mac menu and windows tray support seem a bit fragile and the interest has been low enough that it doesn't have a ribbon menu and various modern animated UI components can be a lot of work in Java. Depending upon what you need the client app to do though it still seems like a totally viable platform. If it does what you need, what does any of the other stuff matter? It doesn't do what I need, and it's direction as a platform indicates that there is no point working on the things I need myself because then I'd have to support them for ever. For most of the major scripting languages (Ruby, Python etc) there are pretty decent libraries for platform integration, and they are being actively used by multiple developers. If I need to patch something then there is every chance that patch will be accepted back into a broadly used library. With Java, the ecosystem of client side developers isn't very large, and there aren't any big companies putting resources into it either. It's just stagnant, and that isn't good enough.