Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: What do people use Java for?
Author: Mark J. Gardner Posted: 2/23/1999; 10:16:25 AM Topic: What do people use Java for? Msg #: 3161 (In response to 3151) Prev/Next: 3160 / 3162
First, please don't take this as the start of a language holy war. We all have our favorite tools and languages, and we all, to paraphrase Dave, produce shitty software (with bugs).As I understand it, Java just prevents you from having one particular kind of memory leak involving unfreed memory or pointers. There's nothing stopping you from writing a Java program (be it application, applet, servlet, whatever) that recursively creates objects until the machine runs out of space. Only something like an OS-provided memory quota can reliably prevent that.
In that context, any language that insulates you from the necessity of managing your own memory or pointers has this same advantage. Examples include Perl, Python, Tcl, and even UserTalk, I think. All can still "leak" memory, whatever its content, but all at least keep the programmer away from error-prone direct memory manipulation.
Having said all that, I think that the "no memory leaks" advantage, combined with Java's portability, is still an attractor -- especially for those used to programming in C or C++ where both memory management and cross-platform programming are a chore. I'm more used to scripting in Perl, though, so neither of those points attract me enough to Java, being adequately covered in my language of choice.
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