Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Chuck Shotton, Java, and WORA

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:7/24/2000; 11:27:27 AM
Topic:Chuck Shotton, Java, and WORA
Msg #:18965
Prev/Next:18964 / 18966

Dave Winer: I spoke with Chuck Shotton yesterday, it had been a long time. His team is not working in Java now, they're using C++. Why? Java is not WORA anymore says Chuck. When did that change? I asked. A couple of weeks ago when Microsoft pulled it out of Visual Studio. I guess Chuck saw it coming?

With all due respect to Chuck Shotton, this makes no sense.

Microsoft's implementation of Java in Visual Studio was the implementation that was at issue in the suit that Sun won, i.e. prior to the corrections mandated by the rule of law, Microsoft's "Java" was violating the properties of Java that allowed it to get as close to the goal of WORA as it has (note that I harbor no illusions about its success rate, with or without Microsoft, being 100%).

With or without a Java implementation available in Visual Studio, or from Microsoft, there are many, many other viable Java development environments for Windows. Personally, I prefer IBM's Visual Age for Java. You can download the Entry Edition, which limits your workspace to 750 classes, for free. Spend a whopping $100 and you get the Professional Edition, which has no such limitation and has some other neat features besides.

Or you could go with Symantec's Visual Cafe'. Or Inprise's JBuilder. Both are quite respected systems by different people.

Chuck's comment also implies that WORA is the only reason to use Java rather than C++, which is also a debatable proposition. Java, which I admit I think of as a badly flawed language, at least doesn't expose raw machine pointers or make me contend with allocating and freeing memory myself, making it far easier to write non-machine-crashing code than in C++. In a time-to-market-driven business like web application development, this alone may be the critical factor in language choices.

The bottom line is that losing MS' Java from Visual Studio isn't a loss at all, and it's certainly no basis for claiming that Java isn't WORA anymore.



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