[lug] Software patents

[Nate Duehr]

On Jun 1, 2009, at 8:35 PM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

> Having spent the last three years doing Java and JBoss  
> (involuntarily) I
> can tell you:
>
> 1. Java, the language, is a terrific object-oriented language.

I'm a sysadmin... never got my head wrapped around object  
orientation.  LOL... okay a little, but I doubt I'd ever find a need  
in my life to use "terrific" and "object-oriented" in the same  
sentence!  (GRIN!)

> 2. The JVM is the second dumbest thing ever invented.

LOL!

> 3. Web Services (for which so many people think Java was invented) is
> the dumbest thing ever invented.

Uhhh... yeah.

> I think any system that magically inserts code
> into my code is doomed to, at the very best, annoy me.

I think this is my favorite tech quote of the year, so far.  ROFLMAO!

> But we've been struggling at work to figure out why the process of
> calling login() on a web service interface we wrote would take up  
> ~20MB
> of memory on the server.  Granted, it's possible our code is the
> culprit, but we removed all our code and had it return null and it  
> still
> takes up ~20MB.  To do nothing.  We're still digging and finding  
> ways to
> improve our code.  But so much for "memory management just works".

This is the kinda stuff we just kept having to throw hardware at a  
number of years ago when our developers were also struggling with  
similar issues at a former company and life for me.  For the sysadmin  
side of the house (which also had the server budget), it was kinda  
gettin' old after the first two years, and I think that company's  
still doing business that way.  With the average price of a meg of RAM  
now almost below $0.02, it's certainly still more cost-effective than  
a re-write, I suppose, once development management had decided to port  
everything to Java...

> What Java offers is a bit of fast development for modest applications
> because you don't really have to worry about memory management.   
> Lots of
> C code is about handling memory.  Java programmers don't worry much
> about that.  Until you get into big enterprise applications and have  
> to
> start mucking with the three (so far) garbage collectors available in
> 1.5 (1.6 apparently has a new one).  When scaled, even Java developers
> have to worry about memory management.

You don't have to scale very far to start running into that, do you?   
It sure didn't seem like it "back then"... maybe it's gotten better.

> Did anyone see that language comparison posted on Slashdot the other
> night?
> http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability- 
> of.html
> Pretty interesting stuff.

That was cool.  I missed that one somehow.  But I have zero clue how  
to interpret the differences in the graphs between say, Perl and gcc.   
And many of the charts look like the gcc chart, but are languages that  
I'd be amazed if more than 100 people really use on a regular basis.   
I also noted the lack of a single traditional or modern shell  
language... hmm...

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com