On Tue, 01 Sep 2020 21:07:14 -0400, Mayayana wrote:

>   Yes. Except that it didn't really work. And it never belonged
> in webpages. And it never belonged on the desktop. As I said,
> it's used for in-house applets, just as .Net is. Neither of them is well
> suited to desktop. What is? Compiled software.
>
What are you talking about?

Javascript != Java and has never been even remotely connected with Java
except that Netscape tried without success to build it into their browser.
Meanwhile they had a parallel project for an interpreted language called
Scheme which added a few syntactical and functional elements copied from
Java and ended up being called LiveScript, then renamed to JavaScript and
later standardised as ECMAScript.

So, the differences are:

- the two languages are syntactically different apart from some features
in common with other languages such as curly brackets and other syntax
that originated from C.

- Javascript is interpreted while Java is compiled

-Javascript is a weakly typed while Java is extremely strongly
typed, which allows the compiler to spot and report a lot of carelkess
nonsense code that isn't found until code in a lot of other languages (C
to name but one along with most interpreted languages such as Perl and
Python) are test run. And if the programmer is careless and skimps
testing, so missing these mistakes, they will can and do live production
runs to crash.

> I forget what Javascript was originally called,

Livescriot - see above.

> What I've been seeing as hack attempts to make cross-platform
> software seems to be mostly Python. And some other packaged kits for
> specific functionality. That's not really cross-platform. Cross-platform
> is software written in versions that run to the various platforms,
> targetting the platform API.
>
Python is compiled, though the compiler is semi-hidden as an interptreter.
Its actually extremely portable - it will run anywhere that has a port of
the interpreter. One of its main failings is that it has poor backward
compatibility: A Python 2.7 program probably won't run on a Python 3
interpreter.

This is unlike Java: I have code written back when Java 1.4 (AKA Java 4)
was the thing thats currently running in an Open Java 1.8 (aka Java 8) JVM
using the Java 8 standard class library and that was last compiled with
javac 1.4

> Great, but not for desktops.
>
Not true. Java programs using the SWING GUI run just fine on my Linux
systems and would run equally well under Windows - no recompilation
needed.

But most Java applications run on server farms. Where adequate
documentation exists large, complex COBOL systems have been or are being
reimplemented in Java.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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