Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 14:00:43 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Softweyr LLC <softweyr@xmission.com> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: JDK 1.02 Message-ID: <9130.841093243@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 26 Aug 1996 14:24:02 MDT." <199608262024.OAA13831@xmission.xmission.com>
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> Um, I recently ftp'd Netscape 3.0b5 to my FreeBSD machine; the java > interpreter seems to work OK. I haven't tested it other than to surf > to www.hungry.com, though. Too "heavy" - I'd like something like "appletview" which I can use to simply test a small hello world applet without having to start the entire behemoth that is netscape. > > different things. Tcl is excellent for instrumenting an existing > > application, say for adding a macro language to an existing word > > Java, on the other hand, was designed to allow programmers to write > applications that would be dynamically downloaded into "network > devices" which would then execute the program and report the results to > the "originator." I've heard this was born out of a second generation Perhaps I should have underlined the words "existing application" in my example a little more, or used caps. ;-) There are significant differences between the programming support market and the new development market. If you're working as an independant consultant, you're generally more than happy to get a development job where you actually get to work with the project team doing the implementation of the nice, new next-generation product, but in actual corporate reality that's somewhat rare. Getting onto a new project is a plum, and one tossed first to employees of the company. As the consultant, it makes more sense to place you in the legacy application group, handling the icky support and slipstream feature hacking for the old product so that the employees, who are all totally burnt out on the old codebase and have threatened a Jonestown-style mass suicide and murder orgy if they're not allowed a total re-write after the very next release, can get on with it. For those people, if you say "java" they will simply look back at you blankly and say "that's very nice, yes, but we were talking about the 70,000 lines of creeping, festering C code we have here and have promised to support for another 3 months. Here is the final critical bug fix and feature list we derived at our last meeting on this topic, back in July. Good luck! Bye!!" [hands you some polaroids of a whiteboard, on which you can barely make out some faint squiggles, and sprints out of the cubicle]. So let's be careful to keep our tools distinct, and realize when one tool is not applicable to the job of another (taking special care to avoid the "I've got this hammer" syndrome). As I said, for instrumenting legacy applications (or any application for which significant internal perturberation is not feasible), TCL is one of several very fine ways to go. Jordan
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