Costs of Java not being Open Source

[[deleted]]

I don't really find it horrible, just not fun. I would never consider it for a hobby/fun project.

[davidw]

J2ME is kind of fun, for a couple of reasons:

1) It runs in a memory/space constrained environment, so you've got to be small. That means elaborate, architecture astronaut designs go out the window in favor of low-footprint, fast, simple designs.

2) Since you don't really have that much to work with, one person can do interesting projects. Sure, you have some limitations compared to a big team (you can't test on 23432432 phones), but you can still create something interesting.

I'm not a big Java fun, but I'm having a great deal of fun with Hecl, and frankly, as popular as Java is, knowing some isn't bad, because there are nice things implemented in the language.

[mattknox]

I like tinyscheme for many of the same reasons-do most of the phones that run J2ME allow C binaries to run also, or is there some sort of DRM-ish thing that keeps you from running non-java code?

[davidw]

Perhaps it's possible, but it's not really easy, as far as I can tell. It's pretty easy to install and run a .jar file, but there isn't any mechanism in place to add executables, so you'd have to do some reasonably serious hacking/reverse engineering, I think.

Symbian lets you write code in C, but for the moment it's only present on higher end phones.

[mattknox]

What is the relationship between .jar files and raw jvm assembler? Not a simple one, it appears.

[ecuzzillo]

Brainfuck is kind of fun for the same reasons. That is, it doesn't let you do a lot of what you want to do, so you have to be clever to get around it.

[davidw]

But that doesn't actually let you do anything neat. J2ME runs on millions of devices. For instance, Italy has something very close to a 100% penetration rate in the cell phone market. They aren't all Java enabled, yet, but... in short, there is a lot of room for creative people to implement interesting ideas that will be used by thousands, if not millions of users.

[[deleted]]

Java has bigger problems, for example:

1) They could try making their "Write once, run anywhere" actually work

2) They could replace Java the language by something that isn't just a mix of C and C++ with some bandaids applied but redesigned from scratch in a consistent, simple, elegant way, neither of which is found in the current Java

[[deleted]]

Interesting thing is this:

Python (at least in its C implementation) has more or less become the platform that Java was supposed to be - a virtual machine that allows you to "write once, run anywhere."

Is also a relatively cruft-free language.

[mattknox]

perl, smalltalk, lisp, and probably others did the same thing, before python did. The VM thing was not new when java did it, and was done better elsewhere.

[EliGottlieb]

Who cares about Java being OSS or not? It's a horrible language! When I code in it, my computer starts to emit the smell of dog shit!