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_expressive power_ What is that anyway? Can you measure it in something other than line counts? I'm wary of line-counts-as-metric. It seems to be a disease of

_expressive power_ What is that anyway? Can you measure it in something other than line counts? I'm wary of line-counts-as-metric. It seems to be a disease of PHBs and functional programmers oddly enough. _severely crippled_ No pointers. What else? There was nothing innovative about Java, but the advantages had nothing to do with "expressiveness" or "power" as I understand them. The advantages were: 1. No malloc(), no free(). If you've ever done large-scale C programming, you'll spend half your time bugging around with memory. 2. Platform independence. Well, you said it. I test on Windows and deploy to linux, and the only real problem has to do with the stupid C: and slash direction on Windows. 3. Don't discount Sun's advocacy. C++ is a pain in the ass, and where you're not optimizing for CPU cycles and real-time performance (where the garbage collector is a problem) it just isn't needed. But to break its inertia something a little more real-world than Lisp macros is needed. So...corporate advocacy has its advantages. 4. Massive libraries. They blow here and there, but put stdlib.h et al to shame. 5. All-in-one. It doesn't do anything perfectly, but a large system can be done all in Java. This is convenient because you don't need fifty different tool sets, can move serialized objects around between subsystems, etc. _making interviewing process very exhausting_ Since you've avoided Java in your career, I suspect you made that up. Edit: Btw, since I'm bitching about downmods, I'll just add that I'm not downmodding anyone here.

palish 19y ago
Expressive power is a few things. Either: - Pointers OR - Garbage-collected reference-counted objects Plus - Closures (incredibly important to have these) Plus - Compile-time macros Plus - Recursion Shawn
pg 19y ago
Expressive power corresponds to shortness of programs, but LOC is not the best measure of that. Roughly, expressive power is 1 over the size of the parse tree.
- aston 19y ago
  I find it entertaining that even pg's most mundane posts get upmoddage like no other. I assume this is why he took himself off the "leaders" listing.
  - vlad 19y ago
    When he went on vacation and stopped posting for a week, the site seemed to slow down. So, obviously, people know what they're doing when they mod up. :)
tx 19y ago
I really do not want to start a war here, especially because I am not a big fan of C++. Quite the opposite. But I can answer some of your questions in case you genuinely want to hear what I have to say :-) On expressiveness: I meant things like foreach loops, ruby blocks, python's list comprehensions, in-place on-demand functions, switch statements with strings, pattern matching, list goes on. Java is not much ahead of C++ in that regard. Not a real upgrade. BTW garbage collection is not really a "feature" of the language. And no, these days people (quality C++ folks) do not spend any time debugging memory leaks. World has changed since early Unix days: smart containers, smart pointers and automatic unit tests largely eliminated memory leaks issues. I honestly do not remember when was the last time I used new() or alloc(). About being crippled compared to C++: do not even get me started. Lack of templates (until relatively recently and they're still not a real thing), lack of multiple inheritance nor mix-ins to replace them, no true functions of any kind, no choice of memory allocation: heap vs stack, this silly "everything is an object" idiom... Again, quality libraries is something I asked to ignore, because it is really not a part of the language. And you are absolutely right here: Java folks have been enjoying the available pool of tools: an order of magnitude bigger than C/C++ guys ever had. And, finally, on platform independence. Java does not run on Windows or Linux. It runs on one platform: JVM, which is conceptually is no different from C++ plus some kind of OS abstration layer, similar to what Mozilla/Apache teams have. Basic idea is always the same: language + runtime. Call it JVM or Library or VMWare host. Yes, I can always develop for Linux and run it under a virtual machine on any host OS, This solution arguably even better than "language VM", since you're taking everything you need to run from one host OS to another.
- Tichy 19y ago
  I feel the "platform independence" makes a huge difference, though. I develop on a windows machine, and I can just deploy the binaries on the Linux-Server. I don't have any version headaches for deploying on various platforms. Maybe that is just a small thing and no big deal for make-wizards, but for me it is enough to avoid other settings like the plague. I ran into problems like that when I tried Ruby, btw. It seems there are different versions for Windows which are not compatible with each other (ie Cygwin version or Visual C++ version).

palish 19y ago

Expressive power is a few things. Either: - Pointers OR - Garbage-collected reference-counted objects Plus - Closures (incredibly important to have these) Plus - Compile-time macros Plus - Recursion Shawn

pg 19y ago

Expressive power corresponds to shortness of programs, but LOC is not the best measure of that. Roughly, expressive power is 1 over the size of the parse tree.

aston 19y ago
I find it entertaining that even pg's most mundane posts get upmoddage like no other. I assume this is why he took himself off the "leaders" listing.
- vlad 19y ago
  When he went on vacation and stopped posting for a week, the site seemed to slow down. So, obviously, people know what they're doing when they mod up. :)

tx 19y ago

I really do not want to start a war here, especially because I am not a big fan of C++. Quite the opposite. But I can answer some of your questions in case you genuinely want to hear what I have to say :-) On expressiveness: I meant things like foreach loops, ruby blocks, python's list comprehensions, in-place on-demand functions, switch statements with strings, pattern matching, list goes on. Java is not much ahead of C++ in that regard. Not a real upgrade. BTW garbage collection is not really a "feature" of the language. And no, these days people (quality C++ folks) do not spend any time debugging memory leaks. World has changed since early Unix days: smart containers, smart pointers and automatic unit tests largely eliminated memory leaks issues. I honestly do not remember when was the last time I used new() or alloc(). About being crippled compared to C++: do not even get me started. Lack of templates (until relatively recently and they're still not a real thing), lack of multiple inheritance nor mix-ins to replace them, no true functions of any kind, no choice of memory allocation: heap vs stack, this silly "everything is an object" idiom... Again, quality libraries is something I asked to ignore, because it is really not a part of the language. And you are absolutely right here: Java folks have been enjoying the available pool of tools: an order of magnitude bigger than C/C++ guys ever had. And, finally, on platform independence. Java does not run on Windows or Linux. It runs on one platform: JVM, which is conceptually is no different from C++ plus some kind of OS abstration layer, similar to what Mozilla/Apache teams have. Basic idea is always the same: language + runtime. Call it JVM or Library or VMWare host. Yes, I can always develop for Linux and run it under a virtual machine on any host OS, This solution arguably even better than "language VM", since you're taking everything you need to run from one host OS to another.

Tichy 19y ago
I feel the "platform independence" makes a huge difference, though. I develop on a windows machine, and I can just deploy the binaries on the Linux-Server. I don't have any version headaches for deploying on various platforms. Maybe that is just a small thing and no big deal for make-wizards, but for me it is enough to avoid other settings like the plague. I ran into problems like that when I tried Ruby, btw. It seems there are different versions for Windows which are not compatible with each other (ie Cygwin version or Visual C++ version).