[Mono-list] Wheen someone asks about java...

[Sam Ruby]

Alex Graveley wrote:
>
> Just found this article about the reality of Java's language neutrality.
> It does not point to any technical reason why language neutrality is not
> possible in java, but rather attempts to analyse real-world
> non-java-the-language java bytecode compiler implementations.
>
> http://www.objectwatch.com/issue_33.htm
>
> Keep in mind of course that Roger Sessions is strongly tied to
> Microsoft, COM, and now .NET on a career-enabling basis. Still
> interesting nonetheless.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, I do find
particularly distasteful the way that freeware is summarily dismissed in
that article.  19 projects are freeware, and therefore irrelevant
(including at least two very active communities that I'm aware of: NetRexx
and JPython).  Only 8 are commercial, and therefore real.  :-(

Raising the discussion up several thousand feet: perhaps Microsoft and Sun
see this as a C# vs Java gambit, but does Ximian have to see it this way?
I don't see the topic of rewriting Perl into C# or Python into C# being
raised daily.

One thing I do daily for kicks and giggles is to build a few dozen Java
projects from source against the latest version of all of their
dependencies and publish the results at
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/gump/latest/ .

Someday you are likely to find a component in this list that it would be
helpful.  Just for grins, lets pick Xalan, an implementation of XSLT.  You
can try taking a snapshot, but unfortunately, that project is undergoing
active development.  There are other components, like XML Schema and SVG
and a complete JavaScript interpreter which not only are undergoing active
development, but the ink is hardly dry on the specifications.

My point?  My recommendation is that "Wheen someone asks about java", the
answer is the same one that is given for Python.

- Sam Ruby