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Subject: RE: More success stories, please
From: galvin.doyle@celtec.co.uk
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 10:58:20 +0100

Klaus,

You also may want to point out that Microsoft (Disclaimer, I am not a
Microsoft advocate just stating fact) look set to stop supporting Java in
the near future (nobody really uses J++), but that they are also building-in
large amounts of language/platform interpolabeility into the .net framework.
Also C# (the forthcoming programming language) looks as if it might have
significant improvements on Java, and is certainly going to be a challenge
to it. What this means is that at some point next year the Microsoft
platform will stop caring which language you wrote a component/app in, or
whether it was Unix/Linux or Windows it was called from. The .net set of
languages will allow you to write COM/COM+ ASP+ in Perl (and also Java or
any other major language you care to mention) and it won't care that it
isn't VB,C++ or C#. 

Java (outside JPython) has no such interpolability between languages, and it
may well suffer as a result (there are already significant rumblings in the
Java community along the lines of how do we respond to this etc.). It also
should be noted that ActiveState are throwing their full weight (along with
Perl and Python) behind Visual Studio 7 and .net, so basically if you stick
with Perl you will be safe/future-proof, interpolable (Unix/Microsoft and
God knows how many languages etc.), reliable, quicker to develop and with
the rewrite for Perl 6 new and funky with a bright future.

Java on the other hand will have to produce something to keep up.

As for success stories, we use Perl for our web apps over ASP and Java (even
though I have full discretion over the platform and programming
environment), if your managers need convincing look to the likes of Amazon -
you can't get much bigger than that.


===

Subject: Re: More success stories, please
From: Rob McMillin <rlm@pricegrabber.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 08:59:41 -0700

galvin.doyle@celtec.co.uk wrote:

> You also may want to point out that Microsoft (Disclaimer, I am not a
> Microsoft advocate just stating fact) look set to stop supporting Java in
> the near future (nobody really uses J++), but that they are also building-in
> large amounts of language/platform interpolabeility into the .net framework.
> Also C# (the forthcoming programming language) looks as if it might have
> significant improvements on Java, and is certainly going to be a challenge
> to it. What this means is that at some point next year the Microsoft
> platform will stop caring which language you wrote a component/app in, or
> whether it was Unix/Linux or Windows it was called from. The .net set of
> languages will allow you to write COM/COM+ ASP+ in Perl (and also Java or
> any other major language you care to mention) and it won't care that it
> isn't VB,C++ or C#.

Does C# look to anyone else like a Microsoft response to "we don't own this
popular Java language thing, so let's try to grab some mindshare by forking a new
language that we DO control"? Yeah, great, if you wanna be bolted to MS platforms
the rest of your life. They're not unique in that -- Oracle does the same with
their "Standard SQL" -- plus hundreds of extensions you MUST use to get decent
performance. So having bought the horse, you bought the cart and the stable, too.

Frankly, I don't buy any of this "interoperability" talk I hear from MS. They
NEVER make cross-platform programming easy if they can help it, unless it's in
one direction, towards MS products. It's the same attitude DEC (remember
them?) had towards Unix back in the day -- if you need software, we have a wall
full of it, right here.

> Java on the other hand will have to produce something to keep up.
>
> As for success stories, we use Perl for our web apps over ASP and Java (even
> though I have full discretion over the platform and programming
> environment), if your managers need convincing look to the likes of Amazon -
> you can't get much bigger than that.

I believe it is also the case that Yahoo is 95% Perl as well.

===



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