Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Mar 4, 7:06 pm, apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:

> Learning to cope with modernity and enjoying it are two different
> things.  I think I cope fairly well with it, and actually manage to
> use both MacOS and Windows (inside an emulator) on a daily basis.
> However, nostalgia aside, that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate
> and prefer things the way things were done in the old days where
> programmers didn't use nanny languages like Java or Visual Basic and
> actually understood what went on in front of the machines they
> programmed well enough to squeeze nearly 100% of what they were
> capable of rather than throwing around memory and CPU like it was
> infinite.

It's certainly a benefit of resource constrained machines that quality
isn't optional, but required. But we should remember that necessity is
a far more prolific mother of invention than ideology :-)

I'm going to have to challenge your position that Java is a "nanny
language" however. Higher levels of abstraction are necessary to
manage higher levels of complexity. A "bloated" toolset that uses
human time more efficiently at the cost of machine resources is
clearly the more 'efficient' option, when you consider total cost.

It's also responsible for popularising many of the architectural
innovations of the software engineering field that had laid dormant
for a long time, since languages in popular use prior to that lacked
the expressive power to harness them. It really was the right tool at
the right time.

Matt