I’m getting really tired of the amount of bigotry in regards to programming languages. First let me admit that I’m certainly guilty of technology bigotry – I’m definitely biased towards Mac OS and Java to name a couple of things, but I’m at least aware of it and willing to admit it. Furthermore I can provide reasonable explanations as to why I like them if not actually explain in every situation why I favor them (read: at times I’m just being bigoted about it).

I ranted earlier about dependencies and the way Java programmers are always pining for the latest and greatest. The comment by Stephen Thorne to the article deserves being published with the same level of visibility as the original post so I quote it below. It also deserves some rebuttal which is also below. I’ve been saying this for years, and yet I still run into rabid pro-java programmers who managed to rattle off a list of reasons why java is the bestest programming language in the world include “good library support” to which my response is “hold on, slow down, good library support?

Greg Black comments on the IBM donation of code to the ASF (at least I think that’s what he meant). Ken Coar has already provided the explations. For the record Greg, your site just gives me “access denied” so I can only read your blog via Planet Humbug and can’t leave this as a comment.

James Strachan puts forward a proposal that Sun opensource the standard Java libraries and I see no problems with it. In general I don’t think we’ll see all the benefits James predicts from it though we would see some. In particular I want to point out one benefit that James claims we’ll get but that we definitely won’t get: more eyeballs are now looking closely at the code This is the biggest advantage opensource proponents put forward for opensourcing any code but it just doesn’t apply to Java.

This article entitled “Great Hackers” really pissed me off. It is just so far off-base that it’s annoying. It’s not the kind of article that is generally wrong on facts, but just wrong on intentions and the concepts of what’s good and what’s bad. There are a few really, really stupid and outright wrong statements in it though. The worst of these is: The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project won’t be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.

I’ve never understood Java programmers attitudes to dependencies. The Java runtime and libraries was designed specifically to allow cross-platform deployment and increase compatibility. Write once, run anywhere. What confuses me then is this obsession Java developers seem to have with being incompatible or rather, using the absolute bleeding-edge, never released, not available anywhere version of stuff – particularly the JRE. Now certainly Java is unusual in that it is rapidly developing.

I’ve been following the JDNC project recently and along the way mentioned that it might be nice to combine the authorization dialogs for WebStart applications that have multiple jars signed by different certs into a single dialog to make it more user friendly. Mark Davidson who seems to work at Sun (I assume on the Swing team) promptly responded that he’d spoken to a WebStart engineer about it, logged an RFE for me and said the WebStart guy was going to talk to the security guys about it during the week.

The story so far: Preston Gralla commented I commented Brian McCallister commented I commented again Brian McCallister commented again At least I think that’s how it went. Firstly, Brian was right to call me on my use of cygwin to bring UNIX capabilities to Windows. It’s not in the default install, it’s not at all obvious and 99% of Windows users will never even hear about it. As Brian says, “if you don’t use it, you don’t learn it”.

Brian McCallister comments on my earlier comments on Preston Gralla’s comments on Linux on the desktop. By and large I agree with Brian, the UNIX command line is a sensationally powerful thing which provides awesome flexibility and power for those who wish to learn it. The downside is it’s awful trying to learn it. I spend a lot of time at a bash command line and I still couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what Brian’s examples do.

Coolness. I’m definitely going to have to take some time and learn about JOGL at some point. I was amazed at how smooth the graphics were, not to mention the seamless, click-a-link installation – even on my Mac.

Preston Gralla’s comments on how Linux didn’t impress him too much really got me thinking. Preston didn’t bash Linux or try to argue that Linux was inferior to Windows – he just pointed out that he can already do everything he wanted to on Windows and didn’t have any problems with it, so why change? That’s Linux’s big problem. It’s biggest feature has always been stability and security. In other words, it’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have Windows bugs.

Mark Pilgrim posts an interesting article entitled XML on the Web Has Failed and he’s right to some degree. Character sets remain a huge mess on the internet, but I think he’s pinning the failure on the wrong technology. It’s not XML that’s failed, but RFC3023 which specifies a set of rules for detecting the XML charset when combined with HTTP. The reason RFC3023 fails is because noone likes the way it works and it’s just not implemented anywhere.