Friday, October 10, 2003

Anders Hejlsberg is Wrong, Part II. And this time it's not me saying it.  James Gosling is saying it.  Excellent.  Bottom line is, it's fun and fast to ignore exceptions or catch them in some pointless top-level loop.  That's fabulous for, I don't know, applications that don't matter?  Now you're writing an app that has to stay up.  This is what most of us are doing now, in the Java world.  It has to stay up for months, or years.  Do you think your top-level exception loop is going to be able to handle the multiple strategies that are necessary to deal with failure in that environment?  You're going to activate retry-logic at the top level? And what the heck is the top-level in any modern Java app anyway?  It doesn't exist. Java helps you build robust code.  That is now, and has always been, its most important feature.  It does a better job of this than any other commonly used language.  We have a couple of a million lines of Java code in our app, and it's pretty damn bulletproof.  Trying to get to that level of reliability in C could take decades.  And no, we are not crappy programmers.  If you think you could do it in less time, you think you're smarter than a lot of very smart people out there who have been writing system-level stuff in C for longer than you have been alive.  Here's a clue: You're not.  You need the help; you just don't know it yet. 2:49:51 PM

At Play in Piccolo. Something unexpected...(this likes a fast machine). 1:54:35 AM