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Has the Java the brand completely evolved from a enterprise Sun product, into a counterculture language? With GWT and other JVM languages, Java is starting to

by spivey 16y ago

Has the Java the brand completely evolved from a enterprise Sun product, into a counterculture language? With GWT and other JVM languages, Java is starting to look cool again.

hello_moto 16y ago
not cool, just mature/polished/stable.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Come on... The JVM is cool.
  - samdk 16y ago
    The JVM, maybe. Some of the stuff you can do on the JVM, yes. Java? Definitely not.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      That's what I said. The JVM is cool. Java certainly isn't.
      - brazzy 16y ago
        So what value exactly is there (for a programming language) in being "cool"?
  - wvenable 16y ago
    The JVM is the x86 of the VM world. Ugly, used for things it was never designed to properly handle, but also heavily optimized.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      No way it could be as ugly as an x86. The x86 has been with us since the 8080 days (the 8086 was a 16-bit 8085, done in a hurry because the i432 flopped). It's a kludge wrapped in a another kludge. Or, as people say, it's kludges all the way down.
      - wvenable 16y ago
        It's not a generic VM. Sure it's got a lot of basic instructions for adding (signed) numbers together but a lot of important instructions are very high-level and very specific to Java. It was never designed to run anything else. So non-Java languages ported to the JVM do involve kludges. The comparison to x86 isn't far off.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        It's improving. Java 7 is much friendlier to dynamic languages and, with it, many of the kludges will be a thing of the past. It would need to be really inelegant to warrant a comparison with the x86...
        bad_user 16y ago
        > Java 7 is much friendlier to dynamic languages ... it would need to be really inelegant to warrant a comparison with the x86 Not that much, and not that inelegant ... at least x86 evolved a lot since 8086. The JVM itself evolved only in the internal architecture, but the bytecode itself is almost the same since Java 1. The best VM for multiple language will soon prove to be LLVM, only because it makes your code cross-platform, while being low-level enough and not being strangled by a standards body. It's actually easier to build a compiler for LLVM than it is for the JVM ... you might not go at first with a generational GC, and the speed might be terrible ... but at least you have room to grow ... I have yet to see a language on top of the JVM beat LuaJIT2 (even Java itself can hardly beat it in simpler benchmarks). And the optimizations in Java7 can be achieved today in Java6 (with lots of workarounds, of course).
        16y ago
- openfly 16y ago
  You are joking right?
philwelch 16y ago
It's funny that you characterize Sun as "enterprise", when Java is now an Oracle product (which is even more "enterprise") while Sun, at least sometimes, was actually pretty cool.

by spivey 16y ago

Has the Java the brand completely evolved from a enterprise Sun product, into a counterculture language? With GWT and other JVM languages, Java is starting to look cool again.

hello_moto 16y ago

not cool, just mature/polished/stable.

rbanffy 16y ago
Come on... The JVM is cool.
- samdk 16y ago
  The JVM, maybe. Some of the stuff you can do on the JVM, yes. Java? Definitely not.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    That's what I said. The JVM is cool. Java certainly isn't.
    - brazzy 16y ago
      So what value exactly is there (for a programming language) in being "cool"?
- wvenable 16y ago
  The JVM is the x86 of the VM world. Ugly, used for things it was never designed to properly handle, but also heavily optimized.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    No way it could be as ugly as an x86. The x86 has been with us since the 8080 days (the 8086 was a 16-bit 8085, done in a hurry because the i432 flopped). It's a kludge wrapped in a another kludge. Or, as people say, it's kludges all the way down.
    - wvenable 16y ago
      It's not a generic VM. Sure it's got a lot of basic instructions for adding (signed) numbers together but a lot of important instructions are very high-level and very specific to Java. It was never designed to run anything else. So non-Java languages ported to the JVM do involve kludges. The comparison to x86 isn't far off.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        It's improving. Java 7 is much friendlier to dynamic languages and, with it, many of the kludges will be a thing of the past. It would need to be really inelegant to warrant a comparison with the x86...
        bad_user 16y ago
        > Java 7 is much friendlier to dynamic languages ... it would need to be really inelegant to warrant a comparison with the x86 Not that much, and not that inelegant ... at least x86 evolved a lot since 8086. The JVM itself evolved only in the internal architecture, but the bytecode itself is almost the same since Java 1. The best VM for multiple language will soon prove to be LLVM, only because it makes your code cross-platform, while being low-level enough and not being strangled by a standards body. It's actually easier to build a compiler for LLVM than it is for the JVM ... you might not go at first with a generational GC, and the speed might be terrible ... but at least you have room to grow ... I have yet to see a language on top of the JVM beat LuaJIT2 (even Java itself can hardly beat it in simpler benchmarks). And the optimizations in Java7 can be achieved today in Java6 (with lots of workarounds, of course).
        16y ago
openfly 16y ago
You are joking right?

philwelch 16y ago

It's funny that you characterize Sun as "enterprise", when Java is now an Oracle product (which is even more "enterprise") while Sun, at least sometimes, was actually pretty cool.