[SLL] faking Unix knowledge? pretend to know open source Unix?

[Chuck Wolber]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Jesse Keating wrote:

[...]

> However with Java, even though the goal is /supposed/ to be run 
> everywhere because everything is duplicated in the JVM, 

You make a good point we should seriously consider your assertion that 
"because Java everything is duplicated in the JVM". Isn't this the design 
pattern used in any interpreter though? Otherwise, how do you advertise 
that you support, oh say for example, file writing and reading? You have 
to duplicate stuff at some level in order to tailor it to the low level 
operating system APIs. It's just an abstraction.

It's the same thing for the Linux kernel. It provides a common interface 
so that it can work on a lot of different uncommon hardware. In their case 
though they drew the line at the CPU architecture and then threw in little 
hacks to detect the CPU variances for a given architecture since not all 
CPUs implement the x86 instruction set in exactly the same way.

Thus an app written on a Linux system is "Write Once Run On Any Linux".


> the reality is that almost every application I've come across in java 
> not only can't traverse platforms such as Unix/Windows, it cannot even 
> traverse different patch versions of a JVM.

Yes, but you just boxed yourself into a logical corner there. I can show 
you plenty of extremely complex Java apps that work great on Windows and 
*ix without any code changes. I think that proves that WORA can be done.


> It wouldn't be so frustrating if the Java mantra wasn't WORA.

Even though they have not said it, the same goes with Python and any other 
interpreted language. All thinge being equal, you do not generally say 
"can I run this app written in Python on my computer". You say "can I run 
python apps on my computer".

With Java, the problem is compounded with "can I run this app written in 
Java version XYZ on my computer *AND* did the programmer screw up WORA?". 
I suspect that if I knew Python really well, I could point out a few 
examples of how that also applies to Python.

..Ch:W..

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