Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 129.240.235.122]
on October 15, 2007 12:35 PM
First off, the whole Javalobby organisation always seemed somewhat superfluous: you had a language already enjoying excessive hype and PHB arm-twisting from its corporate parent, making it politically very difficult for many developers to just get on and use more appropriate tools in their work, and then there's a bunch of people standing on the sidelines cheerleading for what was proprietary software, as if that would get them into Sun's good books and grant them VIP status at "community" events where the massed punters punch the air and chant "developers, developers, developers".
For those too indoctrinated into Sun's "Java the language and the platform" mantra, such as the "Python has no virtual machine" idiot, one should first learn that there are a bunch of Python virtual machines and an implementation of Python that runs on the JVM: Jython. Now, the reason why people might prefer Python over Java for a project like this may have little to do with outright performance of some benchmarks done on high end x86(-64): while the footprint isn't as compact as something like Lua, the tradeoff between performance, usability and resource usage favours Python over Java where the "50-100 times faster" (for some benchmarks, of course) often comes with a huge resource cost which would also affect performance on systems where memory access is also more costly. It's all very well claiming that Java is so ultra-fast if the first thing the JVM does is grab several megabytes of RAM as the just-in-time compiler kicks in.
The JVM may open the door to languages other than Java, of course, but since the OLPC project is Linux-oriented, you can already use languages like Smalltalk (Squeak) or indeed anything that runs on (GNU/)Linux. But that's another problem the Java crowd seems to have: everything has to be framed in terms of the Java platform, even when there's a whole operating system there to do the same job better. Pass the hammer, indeed.
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Javafanboy calls for Java port to OLPC
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 129.240.235.122] on October 15, 2007 12:35 PMFirst off, the whole Javalobby organisation always seemed somewhat superfluous: you had a language already enjoying excessive hype and PHB arm-twisting from its corporate parent, making it politically very difficult for many developers to just get on and use more appropriate tools in their work, and then there's a bunch of people standing on the sidelines cheerleading for what was proprietary software, as if that would get them into Sun's good books and grant them VIP status at "community" events where the massed punters punch the air and chant "developers, developers, developers".
For those too indoctrinated into Sun's "Java the language and the platform" mantra, such as the "Python has no virtual machine" idiot, one should first learn that there are a bunch of Python virtual machines and an implementation of Python that runs on the JVM: Jython. Now, the reason why people might prefer Python over Java for a project like this may have little to do with outright performance of some benchmarks done on high end x86(-64): while the footprint isn't as compact as something like Lua, the tradeoff between performance, usability and resource usage favours Python over Java where the "50-100 times faster" (for some benchmarks, of course) often comes with a huge resource cost which would also affect performance on systems where memory access is also more costly. It's all very well claiming that Java is so ultra-fast if the first thing the JVM does is grab several megabytes of RAM as the just-in-time compiler kicks in.
The JVM may open the door to languages other than Java, of course, but since the OLPC project is Linux-oriented, you can already use languages like Smalltalk (Squeak) or indeed anything that runs on (GNU/)Linux. But that's another problem the Java crowd seems to have: everything has to be framed in terms of the Java platform, even when there's a whole operating system there to do the same job better. Pass the hammer, indeed.
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