Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[apple2freak@gmail.com]

On Mar 5, 11:36 am, mdj <mdj....@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
Java wasn't itself innovative.

It introduced nothing new to the IT industry that didn't already exist
as part of other computing languages.

In fact, I don't think there is anything in Java that isn't in either
Smalltalk (from the 1970s!) or C++ (which it was based heavily upon).

I call it a nanny language because it was originally put forth as a
simplified replacement for C++ at a time when the quality of
programmers had dropped so far that C++ became too much for them.
Since 1.0, it has added nearly ever "feature" that was excluded from
the original specification and thus become just as complex as the
language it was purported to replace.  It also never lived up to the
"write once, run anywhere" paradigm as anyone who has ever attempted
to write a non-trivial application will attest.

Proponents will point to the Java libraries as representing a lot of
power of the platform, but I can just as easily point to the C++ Boost
libraries as representing equivalent power with C++.

And the idea that Java runs just as fast and with just as small a
memory footprint as C++ has not withstood the test of time.
Similarly, the idea that because of the built-in garbage collection,
that Java programs don't have memory leaks has also proven false.

But were are getting more than a bit off-topic here since I don't
think there have ever been any Java interpreters for the Apple II.

--
Apple2Freak