Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. wrote:
> Our potential competitors have been sent on a wild
> goose chase courtesy of Sun and IBM. Since both C++ and Java are, at best,
> poor tools, we have a real competitive edge.
IBM is betting the farm and the house on Java. right now, IBM has more
than 1,000 programmers working full time on Java software according to
latest news. I read that they have a 24-cycle of non-stop development,
spread all over the world.
>
> I might note that the best way to stop Microsoft, is to make better
> products.
there is no time to make good solid well designed software, we are all
busy fixing bugs and making software patches ! customers are waiting for
bug fixes !
I can't beleive the time wasted on bugs that could have been cought by a
language such as Ada instead of C or C++. Java does good compile-time
checking, but the language itself does not lend itself to good large
scale multi-programmer development projects.
Actually most of the problems in programs I see are not technical bugs,
they are also design bugs. Design bugs are much more expensive. This is
becuase less time is spend on design. again, time-to-market pressure.
But even with less than perfect tools, and less than perfect languages,
if you throw hundreds of programmers on it, they will produce something
at the end, and that is the state of the industry we are in. The demand
for more programmers is a result of this cycle:
LOOP
more programmers needed to fix the bugs and to understand the code the
other programmers produced. there is no end in sight for this, the more
programmers you bring in using bad tools, and little software
engineering skills and the rush to build something fast, and little
documentations that goes along with the software being build, the more
problems will show up later and the more programmers you need to help
fix those problems.
END LOOP.
As for Java again, I think it is at least better than C/C++ for sure.
if we were to be locked into Java for the next 20 years, that will not
be as bad as being locked into C/C++ as we have been for the last 20
years. offcourse perl is getting very popular also. can you imagine a
large complex mutli-threaded software project written in Perl? oh
well... software is so much fun..
Nasser
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