From: Raph Levien <raph@cs.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 04:12:01 +0800
To: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Java
In-Reply-To: <199606041306.JAA08943@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <31B58982.1F54@cs.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
[...]

> you don't get it, as others have pointed out repeatedly. you conveniently
> ignore Frantz' points about the well-known difficulties of porting C. there
> is a big difference in what is conneted by the word "portable".
> if it take a zillion different makefile rules to create the "same"
> program on different machines, is that "portable"? isn't that
> defeating the purpose somewhat? c is "sort of" portable. it is
> "in theory" portable. Java is portable "in theory and practice".

   This point is simply not true, at least for Java as it exists in 
Spring 1996. Almost every Java applet I've seen has little UI glitches 
that prevent it from displaying and operating correctly on all 
platforms. Further, there are little glitches in the language 
implementation and library design that often cause portability problems. 
For example, the first cut of Hal's PGP applet had the standard UI 
problems, plus the fact that a "spinner" thread caused the entire 
browser to lock up -- on Unix, but not on Windows. And this was a 5000 
line of code applet. Hal was able to fix the problems, but it's easy to 
see how the effort involved in this "portability engineering" could 
become comparable to your thousand-line makefile as applications scale 
up.
   The promise is there, but Java has not yet delivered.

   Another concern with Java is that it acheives portability at the cost 
of enforcing a lowest common denominator. For example, all real Windows 
applications support OLE, and all real Mac applications support Apple 
Events. Java applets, and even applications, can't do either. To me, 
that makes the accomplishment of portability a bit less impressive, even 
if it were so.

Raph