[ale] .NET

[Joseph A Knapka]

Geoffrey wrote:
> Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 2002-11-01 at 15:39, Geoffrey wrote:
>>
>>> What, you thought Microsoft came up with something original?  Hardly.
>>>
>>> Netscape > IE
>>> Java > activeX
>>> Javascript > vbscript
>>
>>
>>
>> I believe the line goes "there is nothing new under the sun".
>>
>> What is new these days? Do we really want something new and radically
>> different? I don't. I want to take what is already known to be good and
>> improve it. That way I have some reasonable expectation that it will be
>> somewhat successful. Taking your example:
>>
>> Mosiac > Netscape
> 
> 
> Mosaic truly was new so there's one example for you.  My reference to 
> Netscape was that it took the explosion of Netscape for Microsoft to see 
> it as a marketing tool.
> 
>>
>> Smalltalk/C++ > Java
> 
> 
> Java may well be OO as Smalltalk and C++, but byte code approach to Java 
> is new, unless you know of something else that predates that.

Yes, lots. Bytecode compilation has been around for aeons. My
old TRS-80 bytecompiled BASIC code; many (most?) Smalltalk
and Lisp implementations were bytecode interpreted. FORTH has
been bytecode interpreted from its genesis (in, like, 1963 or
something). Perl has been around longer than Java IIRC,
and it's bytecode interpreted, I believe. Python has been
around for (slightly) longer than Java, and it's most
certainly bytecode interpreted. Prolog is usually bytecode
interpreted. Almost all languages that don't compile to
native code compile to an intermediate VM bytecode that gets
interpreted; it's fairly rare for an interpreter to directly
interpret a language.

Java's only innovation was to market the f**k out of the
fact that having a virtual machine liberates you from
the underlying hardware. (Well, OK, the security features may
have been genuinely innovative, but maybe not - I seem
to recall reading somewhere that the Java bytecode
security features were rooted in some earlier implementation
of the same idea.)

Cheers,

-- Joe


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.