On Tue, 01 Sep 2020 09:19:26 -0400, Mayayana wrote:

> I don't understand why so many people want to cast
> Microsoft as the only villain. Yes, MS tried to come up with their own
> version of Java.
>
In this case that's because they were: you do NOT grab somebody else's
product (at that time it belonged to Sun and no part of it was open
source), hack it about to suit yourself without consulting anybody, least
of all the originators and standardisation people, and then try to flog
it to all and sundry. Thats very little different to the way M$ bought
what became MSDOS from its originators so they had something to flog to
IBM, though they did at least buy MSDOS it from its authors. I forget
what, if anything they paid Sun for Java.

> But that's not why Java was phased out. It was phased
> out because it was bloated and unsafe and didn't belong in webpages.
>
You're right that it didn't belong in webpages but not about much else.
Java was essentially a clean-sheet attempt to build something better than
C++ and from the outset it was designed for the 'write once, run anywhere
paradigm', which is why Java runs in the Java Virtual Machine - the
language and compiled code is the same everywhere with all hardware-
specific and OS-specific stuff kept where it belongs - in the JVM

Java is a lot more secure and crash-resistent simply because the compiler
is designed to trap as many coding errors as possible before any compiled
code is emitted. In addition insecure things like null-terminated strings
and commonly misused things (untyped pointers, malloc and friends) are
simply not exposed to coders and all objects are strongly typed, which
gets rid of another heap of security issues. No preprocessors either.

A lot of the more recent languages, e.g. Rust, have used this approach to
designing programming languages and writing compilers, so obviously the
people behind Java did something right.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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