use Perl

• yeah, that's fair (Score:3, Insightful)

  by lachoy (1663)

  <rant>So if I wrote a poorly informed diatribe about how perl sucks so much because I can't use it for my medical imaging needs*, would it be equally valid? Why is it so awful when people spout FUD and nonsense about perl but it's fine when it's about other languages?</rant>

  What's funny is I wind up saying the same thing to Java people about Perl :-)

  (*It could be great for my hypothetical medical imaging needs, but that's beside the point.)
  • Re:yeah, that's fair (Score:2)

    by Matts (1087)

    I thought the article had some valid points. The startup performance issue is a bit of a red herring (i.e. so don't use it for command line scripts then), but it's still a pain in the ass and I don't see why it has to be that way. This is what the author didn't go into - why can't Java start up quickly? If so much effort has been spent in making Java run quickly, what on earth are they doing wrong at startup time?
    
    The whole CLASSPATH situation is a nightmare - much worse than (say) Perl's PERL5LIB system. T
    • Re:yeah, that's fair (Score:2)

      by lachoy (1663) <chris.winters@gmail.com> on 2003.02.27 9:21 (#17565) Homepage Journal

      I didn't think the whole thing was dumb:

      • Command-line programs should have better error messages. But that's a problem with the programer, not java.
      • Startup times are slower, but you generally don't use java for unixy pipeline stringalongs where this would make a big difference.
      • It would be nice if you could put all your JAR files in a directory and use the directory as the classpath rather than specifying each JAR file. But if this was really important I can just explode all the JAR files in a directory and use that.
      • Running a class directly would be nice, but it's really not a big deal. If you're running someone else's program they're generally nice enough to bundle it up in a self-executing JAR for you. And most of the things I run are run through Ant or a shell wrapper anyway.

      But....

      • He's coming at this from a sysadmin perspective. Cross-platform isn't a big deal for him. It's huge for an application developer. The fact that our product can run on many platforms by default is fantastic. Despite his casual dismisal of this, it does work and works well.
      • The straw man of faster programming coming at the expense of quality is just silly. Bringing in the people who think they can program in Java without knowing programming is wrong wrong wrong: do we point the finger at Perl when people practice cargo-cult programming?
      • Comparing Java's speed using tar and jar is just dumb and tells me the author is picking a fight. Not only does jar do more (compression, so he'd have to add a 'z' to his calculations for actual operation time, but tar + gzip will still be faster), they're built for entirely different purposes -- tar is a general purpose archiving tool, jar is built for creating distributable Java libraries. In one sense, this is like comparing the performance of the pure-perl ptar to tar. Wow, it's slower, no kidding. And even worse, he confuses the speed issue by expanding the startup time to the millions of hits on a website. This is like saying Perl is slow because CGI startup times are slow.
      • The whole "Sun won't eat its own dogfood" argument is stupid. The most recent outbreak of this was about a Solaris admin console where they had no need for cross-platform functionality and they already had an existing codebase. This is a damned-if-you-do/don't scenario for them: if they do rewrite it in Java, it won't be as complete (rewrites never are for a while) or fast (native GUIs are faster until you get up in hardware a little, altho I don't know how this plays on Solaris). If they don't rewrite it in Java, people say they're hypocrites for not using it everywhere. Oh well. (Plus this confuses Sun and Java: another red herring.)
      • Finally, there's this attitude throughout that everyone using Java is just deluding themselves. Not only is it condescending, there are an awful lot of opensource Java hackers who'd strongly disagree with that.

      Reply to This

      Parent

      • Re:yeah, that's fair (Score:2)

        by djberg96 (2603)

        You have some valid points - he does judge Java harshly at times and perhaps he is comparing apples and oranges from time to time.

        One of the major drawbacks to using Java (gui apps) from a sysadmin perspective is something I think the author touched on - remote display. Have you ever tried running a Java GUI app remotely? It's a friggin' joke. It goes something like this:

        1. Start remote Java app
        2. Get coffee, chat a while with buddies about latest Buffy episode
        3. Return to desk and find Java app just now st
      • Re:yeah, that's fair (Score:2)

        by ziggy (25)

        A few nits:

        It would be nice if you could put all your JAR files in a directory and use the directory as the classpath rather than specifying each JAR file.

        Java is somewhat extensible in this respect: if you don't like the classloader, write your own. That's how JAR files got integrated into the platform around Java 1.2 or so.

        Not only does jar do more (compression, so he'd have to add a 'z' to his calculations for actual operation time, but tar + gzip will still be faster), they're built for entire
      • Re:yeah, that's fair (Score:2)

        by Matts (1087)

        The point I was trying to make is that while it's not sensible to write command line apps in Java, there's absolutely no technical reason for this, and no reason to accept it as the status quo.
        
        Java should be a nice general purpose programming language, but because of the startup overhead and crappy default error messages (stack trace!) it's not. It's limited to persistent environments or long running programs, which is a shame IMHO.