The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Bertrand Meyer]

In my message on the "second historic mistake" I had
written that, whereas Eiffel has successful commercial
applications approaching the million lines of source
code, there was no comparable experience in Java outside
of applets and of the Java tools themselves. 

A few weeks ago there was an interesting exchange:

	[Ken Garlington]

	!!! The discussion is interesting in that Meyer
	!!! (a) criticizes Java for not being used on large
	!!! projects (whatever happened to unfair criticism
	!!! of new languages?

	[Robert Dewar]

	> > Hmmm! I guess he does not consider the Corel office
	> > suite large. Or perhaps simply does not know about it.

	[Bertrand Meyer]

	> It would be difficult not to know about it,
	> as it gets hammered over and again by Java proponents
	> (along with Java tools themselves) as the example of
	> completed Java development, to the extent that one
	> may wonder whether there is any other.

It's really fascinating to read this again a month later,
with the recent announcements -- widely reported by the
press -- that Corel is dropping its Java strategy altogether.

So much for the showcase success of the century...

-- 
Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE Inc.
ISE Building, 2nd floor, 270 Storke Road, Goleta CA 93117
805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com>
http://www.eiffel.com, with instructions for download

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[BruceMount]

Brett:

>>From: "Brett J. Stonier" <bretts@brightwood.com>
>>What's fascinating to *me* is how much time and energy Eiffel proponents
>>spend attacking Java, instead of being content to use and offer this
>>(supposedly) superior language that, if it is truely so much better,
>>should win out in the end.

As much as I wish it were true, the "better mousetrap" does NOT
frequently win in the marketplace and I find it surprising that
people still think it does.

VHS out-marketed the technically superior Betamax.  Mac were
technically superior to Windows for years and lost the marketing wars.
Objective-C is better than C++ and it lost the marketing wars.

>>Is this "runner-up syndrome" (ala Burger King attacking McDonald's....

 ...another good example.  McDonalds is the unquestioned market
leader.  Does that mean the best food "won out"?

I am particularly suspicious of anything that is totally hyped so that
it is being sold as the cure-all.  I get especially irritated when Sun
(the proprietary owner of Java) run national ads saying "Java is open".

No, Java is not an evil language.  It has many improvements over C++.
No, Eiffel is not a cure-all language either.  However, I do feel that the
Java hype machine has created a tidal wave out of very little water.

As someone that has studied Marketing I can't help but be impressed, just
as I'm impressed by the marketing prowess of Microsoft.

But as a life-long technical person I can't help buy say "the inferior
product is winning......again."  Marketing, it seems, is a much stronger
force than technical reasoning.

How sad.

--Bruce
  BruceMount@aol.com

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Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Flavius.Vespasianus]

In article <34023FC9.59E2B600@eiffel.com>, Bertrand Meyer <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com> wrote:

>So much for the showcase success of the century...

Have you seen the computer game "Lemmings"?

------------------------------------------------
Doesn't the marketing person who decided 
"Windows 4.0" should be called "Windows '95" 
look really stupid right now?


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Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Patrick Doyle]

In article <3402FD4D.C196785B@brightwood.com>,
Brett J. Stonier <bretts@brightwood.com> wrote:
>
>What's fascinating to *me* is how much time and energy Eiffel proponents
>spend attacking Java, instead of being content to use and offer this
>(supposedly) superior language that, if it is truely so much better,
>should win out in the end.  Is this "runner-up syndrome" (ala Burger
>King attacking McDonald's, Pepsi attacking Coke, etc.?)  What's the true
>motivation here?

  That's exactly what it is.  Java is what programmers are currently
turning to in droves, and the Eiffel people are trying to turn some
of that tide their way by highlighting what Eiffel does better than
Java.  I don't blame them.  I happen to think their points are mostly
right.  They do tend to be a bit overexuberant at times, though.

  And by the way, there's certainly no reason to believe that Eiffel
will win out in the end because it's better.  It's going to take
some careful marketing.

>If you're trying to enlighten the world to the wisdom of Eiffel, you
>should know that you're going about it the wrong way.  The
>self-rightous, condescending attitudes used to do it (like the above
>gloating) have turned me off to Eiffel completely.

  I tend to agree with that.  But if you get the opportunity, you should
really give Eiffel a chance.  It's a pretty good system.

 -PD

-- 
--
Patrick Doyle
doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[James P. White]

Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> 
> In my message on the "second historic mistake" I had
> written that, whereas Eiffel has successful commercial
> applications approaching the million lines of source
> code, there was no comparable experience in Java outside
> of applets and of the Java tools themselves.
> 
> A few weeks ago there was an interesting exchange:
> 
>         [Ken Garlington]
> 
>         !!! The discussion is interesting in that Meyer
>         !!! (a) criticizes Java for not being used on large
>         !!! projects (whatever happened to unfair criticism
>         !!! of new languages?
> 
>         [Robert Dewar]
> 
>         > > Hmmm! I guess he does not consider the Corel office
>         > > suite large. Or perhaps simply does not know about it.
> 
>         [Bertrand Meyer]
> 
>         > It would be difficult not to know about it,
>         > as it gets hammered over and again by Java proponents
>         > (along with Java tools themselves) as the example of
>         > completed Java development, to the extent that one
>         > may wonder whether there is any other.
> 
> It's really fascinating to read this again a month later,
> with the recent announcements -- widely reported by the
> press -- that Corel is dropping its Java strategy altogether.
> 
> So much for the showcase success of the century...

As I am sure you will hear, those reports were entirely inaccurate.

What Corel dropped was the already doomed, regardless of language of
development, approach of creating monolithic personal computer product
suites for the consumer marketplace.

In its place is a true network centric architecture in which servers
provide the high volume memory and cpu cycles.  This is an inevitable
consequence of the economics of computing which is now playing out as
the cost of communications decreases.  Corel, along with most other
players in the industry, are and will be using Java to implement that.

As for the size of the products developed with Java so far I am sure the
experience of my company is not unique in having built a working system
of over 500K lines in less than 12 months (and it will be growing into a
system of millions of lines over the next two years).  This involved
combining large modules (50K to 200K lines each) which successfully
integrated with no serious failures even though the respective modules
are all rather immature and barely out of beta (and sometimes not even
that).

Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
percent.

jim
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> The "better" does not always win out, witness VHS over Beta, other 
> cars over the Tucker, etc, etc.

For comp.land.ada, "Edsel" might bo over better  :-)

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Bertrand Meyer]

James P. White wrote:
 
[Quoting me]
> > It's really fascinating to read this again a month later,
> > with the recent announcements -- widely reported by the
> > press -- that Corel is dropping its Java strategy altogether.
> >
> > So much for the showcase success of the century...

[James P. White]

> As I am sure you will hear, those reports were entirely inaccurate.

The Toronto Globe and Mail wrote that Corel was "ditching"
Java efforts. This has been criticized on some newsgroups
as being exaggerated. But here is the report from Computer
Reseller News in Techwire (see
http://192.215.107.71/wire/news/aug/0817corel.html
for the full text):

        OTTAWA -- Corel has rethought its Java strategy, 
        according to sources briefed by the company.

        Now, the plan is to put the bulk of application
        logic on servers, which would then
        serve up what's needed to the client, whether that client
        is a PC or a Network Computer, said Amy Wohl, president
        of Wohl Associates, a Narberth, Pa., researcher.

        Previously, the company was rewriting its bread-and-butter
        drawing and productivity applications in Java. But that
        effort has been delayed significantly.

        Corel now plans to use home-grown technology, code-named
        Remagen [...]
        
        There still will be a lower-end Java suite for NCs due in
        October, Wohl noted, but the thrust has shifted considerably
        to the enterprise.

The word "altogether" in "Dropping its Java strategy altogether"
was based on the initial press reports and may turn out to be too
strong. The jury is still out as to how "altogether" the drop is,
although in the software business "delayed significantly" is often a
euphemism for something more fatal. The point of my note (not a flame,
just a reporting of fact) stands: that the great showcase of Java
triumph, reported everywhere including in these newsgroups, was
perhaps advertized a bit prematurely.

See also: http://www4.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_799.html.

-- 
Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE Inc.
ISE Building, 2nd floor, 270 Storke Road, Goleta CA 93117
805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com>
http://www.eiffel.com, with instructions for download

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> > The "better" does not always win out, witness VHS over Beta, other
> > cars over the Tucker, etc, etc.
> 
> For comp.land.ada, "Edsel" might bo over better  :-)

Someone stole the 'g' from my keyboard.  :-)
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Senior Software Engineer - AFATDS                  Tool-smith Wanna-be
                    wwgrol AT pseserv3.fw.hac.com

Don't send advertisements to this domain unless asked!  All disk space
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Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <34034658.7DE14518@eiffel.com> Bertrand Meyer <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com> writes:

> Jon S Anthony wrote:
> > 
> > In article <34023FC9.59E2B600@eiffel.com> Bertrand Meyer <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com> writes:
> > 
> > [More inflam[m]atory BM statements...]
> > 
> 
> That is a really honest and constructive way to cite

In this particular case - yes it is.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

James White says

<<What Corel dropped was the already doomed, regardless of language of
development, approach of creating monolithic personal computer product
suites for the consumer marketplace.>>

doomed? how does Microsoft Office-97 NOT fit this description?

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jeff Brown]

In article <5tvvsj$lh2$1@news2.digex.net>, ell@access2.digex.net (Ell) writes:
> Brett J. Stonier (bretts@brightwood.com) wrote:
 
> The "better" does not always win out, witness VHS over Beta, other cars
> over the Tucker, etc, etc.

if someone mentions VHS over Beta one more time i think i will scream!
get over it!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Matthew S. Whiting]

Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> 
> The Toronto Globe and Mail wrote that Corel was "ditching"
> Java efforts. This has been criticized on some newsgroups
> as being exaggerated. But here is the report from Computer
> Reseller News in Techwire (see
> http://192.215.107.71/wire/news/aug/0817corel.html
> for the full text):
> 
>         OTTAWA -- Corel has rethought its Java strategy,
>         according to sources briefed by the company.
> 
>         Now, the plan is to put the bulk of application
>         logic on servers, which would then
>         serve up what's needed to the client, whether that client
>         is a PC or a Network Computer, said Amy Wohl, president
>         of Wohl Associates, a Narberth, Pa., researcher.
> 
>         Previously, the company was rewriting its bread-and-butter
>         drawing and productivity applications in Java. But that
>         effort has been delayed significantly.
> 
>         Corel now plans to use home-grown technology, code-named
>         Remagen [...]
> 
>         There still will be a lower-end Java suite for NCs due in
>         October, Wohl noted, but the thrust has shifted considerably
>         to the enterprise.
> 
> The word "altogether" in "Dropping its Java strategy altogether"
> was based on the initial press reports and may turn out to be too
> strong. The jury is still out as to how "altogether" the drop is,
> although in the software business "delayed significantly" is often a
> euphemism for something more fatal. The point of my note (not a flame,
> just a reporting of fact) stands: that the great showcase of Java
> triumph, reported everywhere including in these newsgroups, was
> perhaps advertized a bit prematurely.
> 
> See also: http://www4.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_799.html.

The "Toronto Globe and Mail" doesn't sound like a technical publication
to me, but rather a generic newspaper.  Correct?

As a pilot, I know how accurately most newspapers report airplane
accidents.  If this level of accuracy also applies to technology
strategy reports (and I'll wager it does given the technical awareness
of most newspaper reporters), then I don't think I'd quote this source
in a technically oriented newsgroup.

Matt

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[James P. White]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
> <3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
> > Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
> > experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
> > pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
> > percent.
> 
> If automatic memory management really cut down your development time by
> a factor of several, I hate to think of what on earth you were doing to
> waste that much time previously. Sure memory management problems can be
> persnickety, but if they are taking up 80% of your time, something is
> VERY wrong with the way you are writing programs.

Yes, there is something VERY wrong with the way most programmers (not me
of course) write programs.  

When combining modules from multiple sources it inevitably turns out
that multiple, not very compatible, memory management schemes are used
(sometimes, but not often, more than one scheme in the same module).  It
is also inevitable (lacking the resources of NASA) that the modules have
had insufficient inspection and stress testing and are rife with memory
management bugs and memory munging that are not caught.  The integration
phase (which is where the vast majority of the savings comes) when using
C and C++ with commercial and developmental libraries and modules has
been a black hole for resources in large systems which has swallowed
many (extremely well funded) projects whole. 

Being able to proceed through integration needing little more than
functional testing is a huge boon to large system development and is
reason enough (although there are others) to use Java for commercial
applications.

Your derisive comment does make me wonder how many systems of 500K lines
or more you have designed and built (I am on my fourth one and have had
many happy clients).

jim
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <34059D8A.3F3B7FA4@brightwood.com> "Brett J. Stonier" <bretts@brightwood.com> writes:

> Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
> Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.  Did they attack the U.S. car
> industry?  I'm not an expert on this, but I don't think they did.  They
> made superior cars and sold them at a reasonable cost.  And they made a
> huge dent in the U.S. car industry, knocking them off their throne of
> dominance.  So, it seems to be possible to take the high road and still
> win out.

This is the _only_ way to win out in the end.  It may well be that
this won't be sufficient, but anything else is a sure-fire elixer for
absolute failure for the reasons you cite.  In this particular case
you site, I happen to know that indeed there were no such attacks.

The main reason why this might not be enough is two fold:

1) there needs to be "enough of a win"

2) the _customer_ needs to twig that there is such a win.

By 2) I don't mean the _manufacturer_ (coder, whatever), but the "end
user".

[some, imo, highly accurate stuff about BM and the E-Jihad, snipped]

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jeff Brown]

In article <5u3co8$gtf$3@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>, paul.johnson@gecm.com (Paul Johnson) writes:
 
> VHS vs BETAMAX
ARHGGG!!!!!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Flavius.Vespasianus]

In article <3404E9D8.6E3D@epix.net>, whiting@epix.net wrote:
>Bertrand Meyer wrote:
>> 
>> The Toronto Globe and Mail wrote that Corel was "ditching"
>> Java efforts. This has been criticized on some newsgroups
>> as being exaggerated. But here is the report from Computer
>> Reseller News in Techwire (see
>> http://192.215.107.71/wire/news/aug/0817corel.html
>> for the full text):
>> 
>>         OTTAWA -- Corel has rethought its Java strategy,
>>         according to sources briefed by the company.
>> 
>>         Now, the plan is to put the bulk of application
>>         logic on servers, which would then
>>         serve up what's needed to the client, whether that client
>>         is a PC or a Network Computer, said Amy Wohl, president
>>         of Wohl Associates, a Narberth, Pa., researcher.
>> 
>>         Previously, the company was rewriting its bread-and-butter
>>         drawing and productivity applications in Java. But that
>>         effort has been delayed significantly.
>> 
>>         Corel now plans to use home-grown technology, code-named
>>         Remagen [...]
>> 
>>         There still will be a lower-end Java suite for NCs due in
>>         October, Wohl noted, but the thrust has shifted considerably
>>         to the enterprise.
>> 
>> The word "altogether" in "Dropping its Java strategy altogether"
>> was based on the initial press reports and may turn out to be too
>> strong. The jury is still out as to how "altogether" the drop is,
>> although in the software business "delayed significantly" is often a
>> euphemism for something more fatal. The point of my note (not a flame,
>> just a reporting of fact) stands: that the great showcase of Java
>> triumph, reported everywhere including in these newsgroups, was
>> perhaps advertized a bit prematurely.
>> 
>> See also: http://www4.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_799.html.
>
>The "Toronto Globe and Mail" doesn't sound like a technical publication
>to me, but rather a generic newspaper.  Correct?
>
>As a pilot, I know how accurately most newspapers report airplane
>accidents.  If this level of accuracy also applies to technology
>strategy reports (and I'll wager it does given the technical awareness
>of most newspaper reporters), then I don't think I'd quote this source
>in a technically oriented newsgroup.

As a computer professional (and a pilot as well), I know how accurately most 
trade rags report on the computer industry. The accuracy is no better than in 
the regular newspapers.

------------------------------------------------
Doesn't the marketing person who decided 
"Windows 4.0" should be called "Windows '95" 
look really stupid right now?


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Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Patrick Doyle]

In article <5u2arn$gpt@sun585.failife.com.au>,
Jeff Brown <jeffb@unconfigured.xvnews.domain> wrote:
>In article <5tvvsj$lh2$1@news2.digex.net>, ell@access2.digex.net (Ell) writes:
>> Brett J. Stonier (bretts@brightwood.com) wrote:
> 
>> The "better" does not always win out, witness VHS over Beta, other cars
>> over the Tucker, etc, etc.
>
>if someone mentions VHS over Beta one more time i think i will scream!
>get over it!

  The trouble is not that people mention it.  The trouble is that
they are made to mention it by people who claim that better technology
will win out in the end.  Get mad at them.

 -PD
-- 
--
Patrick Doyle
doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Paul Johnson]

In article <3402FD4D.C196785B@brightwood.com>, bretts@brightwood.com says...

>What's fascinating to *me* is how much time and energy Eiffel proponents
>spend attacking Java, instead of being content to use and offer this
>(supposedly) superior language that, if it is truely so much better,
>should win out in the end. 

If you really think that the technically superior solution will always win,
I suggest you read up on the history of technology.  Some counter-examples
are:

VHS vs BETAMAX
Decca vs LORAN
IBM PC vs just about anything else.
C++ vs Ada

Paul.

-- 
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Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes:
>Objective-C was not better than C++.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "better".

- Cheaper to enter?
  Someone here wrote an Objective C compiler in a couple of months spare
  time several years ago.  You got more OOP bang for the compiler
  development buck.  

- Compiler reliability?
  _Because_ the job of an Objective-C compiler is much much simpler than
  the job of a C++ compiler, you get rather more compiler reliability
  for the same level of investment.

- Library design?
  The Objective-C libraries were designed with the language, just like
  Eiffel.  Unfortunately, a split developed, with StepStone owning the
  original libraries, and other free libraries being developed, which
  eroded this benefit.

- Better support for OOP?
  Objective-C provided things like save/load for objects.

- Better support for evolutionary programming.
  The fact that Objective-C is dynamic and C++ is static is not an
  accident.  Stroustrup was starting from a Simula background and
  trying to "sell" OOP to people who demanded "efficiency", which
  implies a static language.  The designer of Objective-C was more
  concerned with long-span _maintenance_ costs and chose a design
  that he thought would reduce _that_:  no good having a fast program
  if it is now far too expensive to make it do what you want.

>Objective-C was a basically
>"Smalltalk in C": a dynamically typed OOP language embedded inside C.
>In my humble opinion, this is not a good match.

Objective C _has_ changed, and there is a bit more static checkability
than there used to be, but dynamicity was what the design was supposed
to achieve.  I imagine that _any_ level of dynamicity will be a poor
match with C.  Don't forget, Dylan was years in the future when ObjC
was designed (:-).

>To the best of my
>knowledge, Objective-C lacked static checking and was much less efficient
>than C++.

"Much less efficient"?  At what?  It's possible to win all the battles
and still lose the war.  ObjC was designed to permit certain _kinds_ of
efficiency (like code-sharing and development time) at the expense of
others; C++ was designed to permit certain _kinds_ of efficiency (like
run-time) at the expense of others.  One could quite fairly say that
ObjC dynamism doesn't encourage bloated programs the way that C++ 
templates do, and for the sizes of machines current when ObjC was designed,
that was a major factor in over-all _system_ efficiency.  (Why do I need
to give a certain web browser 16Mb of memory?  Amongst other things, because
of OOP languages that _aren't_ dynamic.  Why don't I use that browser on
machine X? Because I only _have_ 16Mb on that machine, and the OS needs
some of it.)

Efficiency is a property of _programs_, not _languages_.  I once had a
Prolog program that ran faster than the Fortran program it replaced,
and the Fortran compiler generated native code and the Prolog program
didn't.  Reason?  Prolog had encouraged me to think in a way that
suggested a far more efficient algorithm and made it easy for me to write
that algorithm.  

Is there any evidence that _applications_ developed in Objective C in the
NextStep environment are materially less efficient than similar applications
developed in C++ for that or some other environment on the same hardware?
-- 
Unsolicited commercial E-mail to this account is prohibited; see section 76E
of the Commonwealth Crimes Act 1914 as amended by the Crimes Legislation
Amendment Act No 108 of 1989.  Maximum penalty:  10 years in gaol.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Nick Leaton]

There is a large article in the Wall Street Journal on Java 
Dated 28th August

-- 

Nick

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Brett J. Stonier]

Bruce -

I can certainly appreciate you opinion.  Although I like playing with it
and see promise for it, I, too, do not think Java to be the end-all,
be-all of development tools.  And, yes, Sun is overhyping it for the
wrong reasons.  And, yes, it can be frustrating when technically
superior products (especially ones you have an interest in, like one in
which you have programming experience) do not win out over inferior
products that have better marketing.  I have a good degree of
programming experience in SQLWindows, for example.  SQLWhat?  "Oh, its
like Powerbuilder or (shudder) VB, but much better."  :-)  Nowadays, its
pretty much dead.  :-(

However, from a fairly unbias observer's standpoint on these Eiffel vs.
Java threads, I am saying that the Eiffel proponents are taking the
wrong approach.  Most of the threads have been kicked off by posts by
Meyer, who presents an arrogant, condescending attititude towards Java.
When you insult Java like that you are insulting Java programmers and
creating resentment towards yourself.

I went into these posts fairly neutral, with a positive image of both
Java and Eiffel, and came out turned off towards Eiffel.  I believe this
is the exact opposite of the effect that is desired.  If this is the
marketing approach that will be used, let's learn a bit from these
technological history lessons everyone's been presenting, and seal the
fate of Eiffel right now.

Brett S.
http://www.mtjeff.com/~calvin/devhbook

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Brett J. Stonier]

Paul Johnson wrote:

> In article <3402FD4D.C196785B@brightwood.com>, bretts@brightwood.com
> says...
>
> >What's fascinating to *me* is how much time and energy Eiffel
> proponents
> >spend attacking Java, instead of being content to use and offer this
> >(supposedly) superior language that, if it is truely so much better,
> >should win out in the end.
>
> If you really think that the technically superior solution will always
> win,
> I suggest you read up on the history of technology.  Some
> counter-examples
> are:
>
> VHS vs BETAMAX
> Decca vs LORAN
> IBM PC vs just about anything else.
> C++ vs Ada
>
> Paul.
>
> --
> Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my
> opinions. |
> +44 1245 242244
> +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
> Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of
> little
> Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.

I never said *always*, but yes, it does help.  What about the Japanese
car companies of the 80s?  However, that was not my main point, which is
that the Eiffel supporters are making themselves out to be elitists and
whiners.  Do you think it would have helped Betamax to stamp their feet
and yell "VHS sucks, we're better!" and "VHS tapes are only suitable for
music videos!"?  The problem here is that too many people already had
VHS machines, and when the competition tells you what you just purchased
is lousy (implying you must be a bit slow to have bought it in the first
place) it only serves to make you dislike them and turn you off to their
product.

So, when Eiffel people say "Java is a toy", all they are doing is
building resentment towards Eiffel, further sealing its fate.

Brett

P.S.  Your C++ vs Ada example is purely subjective.

P.P.S.  I do really like your Zork reference, though.

--
Brett S.
http://www.mtjeff.com/~calvin/devhbook

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Brett J. Stonier]

Ell wrote:

> The "better" does not always win out, witness VHS over Beta, other
> cars
> over the Tucker, etc, etc.
>
> By hanging in there, doing there thing and opening people's eyes,
> perhaps
> the runner ups can "take the hill".  [Btw, for me Burger King does
> make a
> better burger.  That is until I give up meat.] I generally find it
> useful
> when I'm given another perspective versus the hegemonic, or dominant
> ones
> (which doesn't mean I necessarily agree however).
>
> Elliott
> --
> "The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
> "We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
> See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central:
> http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Since everyone is trying to give me a technological history lesson,
let's examine that for a second.  Has Burger King's or Pepsi's efforts
to defame their #1 competitors been successful?  Last I checked, they
are both still very much #2.  So, what we learn from this is that when
the #2 tries to dethrone the #1 by directly attacking it, it doesn't
seem to work well.

Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.  Did they attack the U.S. car
industry?  I'm not an expert on this, but I don't think they did.  They
made superior cars and sold them at a reasonable cost.  And they made a
huge dent in the U.S. car industry, knocking them off their throne of
dominance.  So, it seems to be possible to take the high road and still
win out.

This high road is not what I've been witnessing in these threads and
from Meyer.  I am interested in Java and play with it, but I am
certainly not so delusional as to think it has yet fully arrived, is
suitable for air traffic control systems, or will ever solve the world's
problems.  Yet when Eiffel proponents denounce it as a toy or a sham,
they insinuate that those who use it are not intelligent enough to make
the proper choice.  And this will cause resentment towards Eiffel among
Java users (quite a few people, these days!), which is (I believe) the
exact opposite of what they are trying to achive.

Brett S.
http://www.mtjeff.com/~calvin/devhbook

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[James P. White]

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Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> ...
> http://192.215.107.71/wire/news/aug/0817corel.html
> for the full text):
> 
> ...
>         Corel now plans to use home-grown technology, code-named
>         Remagen [...]
>...

There's another thing which illustrates how the reporters totally missed
the point, Remagen is implemented in Java!  It is Corel's network
centric (or as they say with the current marketing buzz - "enterprise")
application server technology.

For those who actually care about what Corel is doing, you can go to
their home page <http://www.corel.com>.  They have a link on their front
page pointing you directly to  documentation of their current efforts
and product roll out plans for their Java technology.  One of the pages
there (updated to dispel the misinformation from that article) is
<http://www.corel.com/javastrat/commitment.htm>, which begins:

>    Corel's Commitment to Java�Stronger Than Ever
>    100% Pure Java on the Desktop 
> 
>    With the development of the prototype Corel Office for Java product, 
> Corel has pioneered the use
>    of Java in the implementation of mission-critical business applications. 
> Network-centric computing
>    has rapidly emerged as the dominant new direction for the enterprise. 
> Corel's new Java-based
>    solution creates a bridge to existing Windows applications and legacy 
> files, and also empowers
>    the emerging Network Computing (NC) paradigm.
>...

So while I understand your glee at the prospect that your prediction
about Java's eminent failure had already received the confirmation of a
major casualty, you will have to accept that Corel is anything but.  In
fact the whole point of their announcement was that their early efforts
confirmed their strategy and that they are now expanding it into the
next stage of both technology development and deployment.  

So Corel continues as the Great Java Showcase and I predict that they
will consequently have considerable success in the marketplace for
corporate office software, an area in which they  (the WordPerfect
product they bought from Novell) were about to fall into oblivion.  

When Corel's success with their office software in Java is examined
several years from now, it will be understood simply as the normal
process of competitive pressure leading an innovative company into
creating a new technology to out compete the dinosaurs who are stuck
with the old paradigm (unfortunately for Corel, Microsoft has also
demonstrated that Bill understands the future of Java too by having
dropped their previous strategy for network dominence - Blackbird - in
favor of Java only weeks after JDK 1.0 was released).

Also, the next time you start another one of these cross posted
monsters, please use comp.lang.java.advocacy instead of
comp.lang.java.tech.

jim
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[not]

On 08/27/97, Fergus Henderson wrote:
>
>Objective-C was not better than C++.  Objective-C was a basically
>"Smalltalk in C": a dynamically typed OOP language embedded inside C.
>In my humble opinion, this is not a good match.  To the best of my
>knowledge, Objective-C lacked static checking and was much less efficient
>than C++.
>

I think that Objective-C from Stepstone permitted both static type checking 
and static binding as an option.  Objective-C from NeXT permits static type 
checking.  NeXT also introduced Objective-C "Protocols" which were used by 
Sun as a model for Java "Interfaces".  In either case you can determine the 
"type" of an object without knowing it's class.

Objective-C is somewhat slower than C++.  I've seen empirical estimates 
that place the difference in the range of 10%.  If you need that extra 10% 
performance, and you can design a nice efficient system and implement it 
successfully using C++, go ahead.  Taligent had a lot of trouble with sytem 
design using C++.  But maybe you can do it.

Let me know how you make out after you've profiled your C++ code and you 
want to make some changes in the design in order to improve performance.  
You might find it's possible to arrive at a more efficient design, given 
the same resources, with a language that supports dynamic type checking, 
notwithstanding the overhead imposed by the run time environment.


-- 
invert:  umich.edu jdevlin
insert:  shift "2"

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

<<  The trouble is not that people mention it.  The trouble is that
they are made to mention it by people who claim that better technology
will win out in the end.  Get mad at them.>>

But it is a bad example. The critical factor in the VHS victory was that
it came out with longer playing tapes earlier, at a time when tapes were
still quite expensive. True, the image quality was not as good, but that
was not what mattered most to consumers.

Thus this even it really much better cited as a simile for cases where
technical folk misunderstand customers needs, and concetrate on aspects
of what they see as quality which in fact are unimportant.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

neil says

<<Eiffel has had that for years, so your productivity boost is only over the
C languages. For the other several hundred percent you need to apply DBC,
even if only methodologically.>>


Any time that people claim giant factors in productivity improvements, they
do the technology for which they make the claim a disservice.

The trouble is that when anyone reads a silly claim like the above, they
tend to assosicate it with everyone who has been supporting the feature.
Certainly Betrand Meyer is not going to claim a "several hundred percent
improvement" in  productivity from using DBC. Just that it can provide
in some circumstances a significant productivity boost.

Ada has been hurt in the past by ludicrous claims, and it is a common
phenomenon.

Of course when a methodology, or language, or technique, or whatever,
has the effect of resulting in working code instead of catastrophic
non-working code, then in some sense the improvement in productivity
is infinite, but this is not a useful quantitative way to look at things.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Paul Johnson said

<<IBM PC vs just about anything else>>

Another example where the techies think they know better than customers.
If you don't understand why the IBM PC succeeded over what seem to you
to be clearly technically superior alternatives, you just don't understand
that market place!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
<3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
> Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
> experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
> pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
> percent.

If automatic memory management really cut down your development time by
a factor of several, I hate to think of what on earth you were doing to
waste that much time previously. Sure memory management problems can be
persnickety, but if they are taking up 80% of your time, something is
VERY wrong with the way you are writing programs.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Mike Coffin]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2911 bytes --]


Bertrand Meyer <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com> writes:

> James P. White wrote:
>  
> [Quoting me]
> > > It's really fascinating to read this again a month later,
> > > with the recent announcements -- widely reported by the
> > > press -- that Corel is dropping its Java strategy altogether.
> > >
> > > So much for the showcase success of the century...
> 
> [James P. White]
> 
> > As I am sure you will hear, those reports were entirely inaccurate.
> 
> The Toronto Globe and Mail wrote that Corel was "ditching"
> Java efforts. This has been criticized on some newsgroups
> as being exaggerated. But here is the report from Computer
> Reseller News in Techwire...

Rather than rely on sources that are notoriously unreliable when it
comes to technical information, how about just going to the source?
E.g., http://www.corel.com/javastrat/index.htm.  Here is the
front matter:

    "This document outlines Corel's Business Applications strategy and
    the role that Java plays. The future focus of Corel's Business
    Applications targets three primary areas.

    "The first area of concentration for Corel is to add Java
    technology (code named Remagen) to its existing suite that will
    allow Corel� WordPerfect� Suite 8, or other software such as
    Microsoft� Office, to be run on a server and accessed via a thin
    Java client on any Java virtual machine. Targeted to the corporate
    community, this product will allow for lower maintenance costs and
    cross-platform access to the Corel family of products and any
    other Windows NT�-based application.

    "The second step is to produce a new line of products that are
    Internet-centric and take advantage of Corel's Java
    expertise. This new product line will combine concepts found in
    our present CorelCENTRAL product that ships in Corel�
    WordPerfect� Suite 8, evolving technology from our Corel� Office
    for Java, and other technology and concepts that are presently
    being worked on at Corel. This development will create a new
    generation of products for information management and knowledge
    handling inside and outside the organization.

    "The third area of concentration for Corel is to continue producing
    and evolving its present suite of Windows� products.  Corel's
    customers can expect to see future versions of Corel WordPerfect
    Suite as the company moves these business applications forward."

None of this sounds much like Corel is "ditching" Java.  I think that,
as usual, the press is engaging in pack journalism.  Someone early on
interpreted what Corel did as a retreat from Java, so journalists from
all over raced off to write that story.  The fact that it wasn't
actually true doesn't matter much: it's a *big* story, and lot's of
people *want* it to be true.  So we get a sort of Gresham's law of
journalism where bad journalism drives out good.

-mike

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[James P. White]

Neil Wilson wrote:
> 
> James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
> <3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
> > Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
> > experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
> > pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
> > percent.
> 
> Eiffel has had that for years, so your productivity boost is only over the
> C languages. For the other several hundred percent you need to apply DBC,
> even if only methodologically.

Yes, you are quite right, I did not explain that I was comparing the
experience with C and C++ using large commercial libraries for GUI,
database, and communications.  LISP has had those features too for
nearly 40 years now and Smalltalk for 14 years.  So obviously there is
more to Java and its success than just those features.  I personally
have been using DBC and OO methodolgy for 16 years, so I already have
those several hundred percent (which does have a good deal to do with my
success in developing large and reliable systems).

jim
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Ell]

Jon S Anthony (jsa@alexandria.organon.com) wrote:
: In article <34059D8A.3F3B7FA4@brightwood.com> "Brett J. Stonier" <bretts@brightwood.com> writes:
: 
: > Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
: > Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.  Did they attack the U.S. car
: > industry?  I'm not an expert on this, but I don't think they did.  They
: > made superior cars and sold them at a reasonable cost.  And they made a
: > huge dent in the U.S. car industry, knocking them off their throne of
: > dominance.  So, it seems to be possible to take the high road and still
: > win out.
 
: This is the _only_ way to win out in the end.  It may well be that
: this won't be sufficient, but anything else is a sure-fire elixer for
: absolute failure for the reasons you cite.

No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other factors.
The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.

: In this particular case
: you site, I happen to know that indeed there were no such attacks.

I can remember the Japanese automakers hitting the US ones hard in the
'70's and '80's on quality, and mileage.  I don't know how much this
helped them, but they did it.
 
: The main reason why this might not be enough is two fold:
: 
: 1) there needs to be "enough of a win"

Again, an inferior product can "win" due to factors other than the those
inherent in the products being compared.
 
: 2) the _customer_ needs to twig that there is such a win.

Often for the _customer_ to "twig" things, the customer's eyes and ears
need to be opened.  This the Japanese automakers did freely.

: By 2) I don't mean the _manufacturer_ (coder, whatever), but the "end
: user".

That is what I mean also.

Elliott
-- 
"The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
"We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central: http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Brett J. Stonier]

Ell wrote:

> No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other
> factors.
> The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.

Elliot -

You continue to miss the point.  Nobody is saying that inferior products
can't win out over better ones; look at Microsoft, for god's sake!  But,
when this happens, you can usually find marketing or other mistakes that
were made by the better technology providers.

This "low road" method of runner-up marketing is a mistake for Eiffel
proponents, IMHO, just as it has failed to help other "runner-ups" in
other industrys to gain the dominance they seek.  At this point, its
fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy of obsolesence.  Learn from these
other guys mistakes, and market Eiffel right!

Brett S.
http://www.mtjeff.com/~calvin/devhbook

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <5u5m5b$7q6$1@news2.digex.net> ell@access1.digex.net (Ell) writes:

> : > Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
> : > Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.  Did they attack the U.S. car
> : > industry?  I'm not an expert on this, but I don't think they did.  They
> : > made superior cars and sold them at a reasonable cost.  And they made a
> : > huge dent in the U.S. car industry, knocking them off their throne of
> : > dominance.  So, it seems to be possible to take the high road and still
> : > win out.
>  
> : This is the _only_ way to win out in the end.  It may well be that
> : this won't be sufficient, but anything else is a sure-fire elixer for
> : absolute failure for the reasons you cite.
> 
> No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other factors.
> The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.

Ell, I meant (was replying to) the idea of a superior product's
possibility of "winning out".  We all know that inferior things often
win out.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Ell said

<<No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other factors.
The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.>>

No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with products
is how superiority is measured.

The trouble is that technical people tend to think that wizz-bang technical
features are what is important. No doubt the Sony guys working on Beta
really thought that image quality was the most important factor -- it was
of course NOT true, and the longer playing time of VHS was what consumers
wanted.

Technical people are always sitting around grumbling that consumers don
t make the "right" choice, but usually such grumbling is just an expression
of incompetence in their ability to figure out what is important.

There are many reasons people buy product A over product B. They prefer
a large company (which tends to get reflected by advertising clout), they
like pretty packaging, they like being sure it will still be around a while
from now, they don't want to feel they are experimenting etc etc etc. The
fact that some technie thinks that super feature X is what is important
is pretty irrelevant.

I saw an interview with one of the guys from the MIT Media lab a few years
ago, saying that he thought that HDTV was completely mis-directed. His
question: "Ask someone on the street what is wrong with TV, they will not
say 'lack of definition'". I always remember this, because I thought it
was an excellent lesson in not focussing on technical excellence.

This certainly applies in the field of computer programming languages.

The mere fact that language X is superior to language Y is certainly not
enough. The issues of continued support are critical. And indeed the
effort in Ada 95 to concentrate on providing effective interfacing to
other languages, something almost completely missing in most other
languages, reflects the understanding that being able to interface to
existing software components written in other languages is crucial.

Often as CEO of ACT, I find that my most important task is to convince
customers not that Ada is superior, they know that, but rather that
they can choose Ada and be sure that support for Ada will be around in
the future. Indeed our entire business plan at ACT is aimed at ensuring
that this is the case. We concentrate entirely on Ada, and we intend
to maintain a small low-overhead operation, allying ourselves with
various tool producing companies, and working on making GNAT easy
to deal with for the tool manufacturers. We believe that this is a
convincing strategy for ensuring that the Ada technology, superior
from a narrow language point of view, is also superior in other terms
that may in the long run be equally important.

Actually the entire free software approach is valuable here. We don't make
our money by charging an arm and a leg up front, instead we are building
are business by gathering customers who are interested in long term
maintenance.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jay Martin]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Ell said
> 
> <<No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other factors.
> The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.>>
> 
> No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with products
> is how superiority is measured.
> 
> The trouble is that technical people tend to think that wizz-bang technical
> features are what is important. No doubt the Sony guys working on Beta
> really thought that image quality was the most important factor -- it was
> of course NOT true, and the longer playing time of VHS was what consumers
> wanted.
> 
> Technical people are always sitting around grumbling that consumers don
> t make the "right" choice, but usually such grumbling is just an expression
> of incompetence in their ability to figure out what is important.
> 
> There are many reasons people buy product A over product B. They prefer
> a large company (which tends to get reflected by advertising clout), they
> like pretty packaging, they like being sure it will still be around a while
> from now, they don't want to feel they are experimenting etc etc etc. The
> fact that some technie thinks that super feature X is what is important
> is pretty irrelevant.

I wish I had such "faith" in the rationality of human
beings.  Of course when you hear: "We don't need no 
stinkin language designed by some military bureaucracy"....
:-)

Jay

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Ell]

Jon S Anthony (jsa@alexandria.organon.com) wrote:
: In article <34059D8A.3F3B7FA4@brightwood.com> "Brett J. Stonier" <bretts@brightwood.com> writes:
: 
: > Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
: > Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.  Did they attack the U.S. car
: > industry?  I'm not an expert on this, but I don't think they did.  They
: > made superior cars and sold them at a reasonable cost.  And they made a
: > huge dent in the U.S. car industry, knocking them off their throne of
: > dominance.  So, it seems to be possible to take the high road and still
: > win out.
 
: This is the _only_ way to win out in the end.

Not that you are saying it, but winning does not necessarily mean "taking
it all".  It may mean having a higher level of impact in either, or both,
a non-dominant way quantitatively, or in one or more specifically focused
qualitative ways.

Elliott
-- 
"The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
"We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central: http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Laurent Guerby]

doylep@ecf.toronto.edu (Patrick Doyle) writes:
> > [...]
>   That's a pretty cheap shot, Robert.  Plus, it's not necessarily
> true.  There are applications that just beg for automatic memory
> management, and if they happend upon one of these, they certainly
> could have seen such an improvement.
> 
>   For my part, I'd guess that at least 40 to 50% of my time is
> spent looking for memory allocation bugs in C++.
> [...]

   Ada has the ability to manipulate unconstrained objects (something
like returning dynamic sized objects/arrays) without requiring user
heap management. The greatly obviates the need for user
allocation/deallocation, you can write very large Ada programs without
doing fine grained heap management (and I agree with you, very error
prone unless you're some kind of programming deity ;-).

   When doing graph/tree stuff, you'll often see a big dynamically
allocated array behind the scene in Ada programs, reallocated when
there's not enough room, a good example of this is GNAT (see the
generic unit table in the sources).

   It is an area where language matters, by allowing stack (the Ada
compiler may use dymaic allocation behind your back, but I guess most
modern Ada technologies use a secondary stack) allocated complex
dynamic types (Ada case) or by providing garbage collection (Java).

   I've seen high level translation to Ada of C++ API, which
originately required the user to worry a lot about heap management
(conventions C1, C2, ... C6, that kind of stuff), giving an Ada
version without any heap management (discrimated types and
unconstrained arrays doing the job). Needless to say, bye bye the "40%
to 50% of the time" chasing heap problems ;-).


-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@gnat.com>, Team Ada.
   "Use the Source, Luke. The Source will be with you, always (GPL)."

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Paul Johnson]

In article <dewar.872791624@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu says...
>
>Paul Johnson said
>
><<IBM PC vs just about anything else>>
>
>Another example where the techies think they know better than customers.
>If you don't understand why the IBM PC succeeded over what seem to you
>to be clearly technically superior alternatives, you just don't understand
>that market place!

I understand that marketplace perfectly well.  I know the history of the 
IBM PC and its clones.  I can see the logic of each decision which 
brought us to where we are now (me typing this on a P5-90 under Win95).
That does not negate my point.  If anything, it re-enforces it.

I've talked to people about Eiffel, and then watched them go out and buy
C++.  And I understand their reasons perfectly well.

Paul.


-- 
Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my opinions. |
+44 1245 242244         +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Paul Johnson]

In article <34059D8A.3F3B7FA4@brightwood.com>, bretts@brightwood.com says...
>
>Ell wrote:

>Since everyone is trying to give me a technological history lesson,
>let's examine that for a second.  Has Burger King's or Pepsi's efforts
>to defame their #1 competitors been successful?  Last I checked, they
>are both still very much #2.  So, what we learn from this is that when
>the #2 tries to dethrone the #1 by directly attacking it, it doesn't
>seem to work well.

Avis did rather well with "we try harder".  I don't think you can read 
too much into this.

>Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
>Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.

They were not competing in a standards war.

Imagine that the Japanese cars, for some strange reason, had to be 
right-hand-drive models whereas the US standard is left-hand-drive (I 
do hope I've got that the right way round).  How many cars would they 
have sold then?

>I am interested in Java and play with it, but I am
>certainly not so delusional as to think it has yet fully arrived, is
>suitable for air traffic control systems, or will ever solve the world's
>problems.

Some people are not as enlightned as you.

Also, I think you might forgive us some frustration.  Eiffel has been
around now for over 10 years, but is still very much a minority language.
Sun come along with Java, and suddenly it makes more progress in 1 year than
Eiffel has in its entire existence, despite being clearly inferior to
Eiffel on every ground that Eiffel has ever been criticised on.  
Aaarrrggghhhh.

>Yet when Eiffel proponents denounce it as a toy or a sham,
>they insinuate that those who use it are not intelligent enough to make
>the proper choice. 

So what do we do?  Shut up and be smug about how we know so much better?

Java, I notice, is being hyped as an improvement on C++ (which it is).
Why can't we hype Eiffel as an improvement on both?

Paul.

-- 
Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my opinions. |
+44 1245 242244         +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Peter Hermann]

Patrick Doyle (doylep@ecf.toronto.edu) wrote:

>   For my part, I'd guess that at least 40 to 50% of my time is
> spent looking for memory allocation bugs in C++.

great! keep on spending  :-)

>   If this isn't the case with you then, well, I suppose you're
> just the greatest darn programmer in the whole world.

Not at all, he simply uses Ada ;-)

--
Peter Hermann  Tel:+49-711-685-3611 Fax:3758 ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
Pfaffenwaldring 27, 70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Arthur Nelson]

Patrick Doyle wrote:
> 
> In article <dewar.872791474@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
> >James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
> ><3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
> >> Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
> >> experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
> >> pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
> >> percent.
> >
> >If automatic memory management really cut down your development time by
> >a factor of several, I hate to think of what on earth you were doing to
> >waste that much time previously. Sure memory management problems can be
> >persnickety, but if they are taking up 80% of your time, something is
> >VERY wrong with the way you are writing programs.
> 
>   That's a pretty cheap shot, Robert.  Plus, it's not necessarily
> true.  There are applications that just beg for automatic memory
> management, and if they happend upon one of these, they certainly
> could have seen such an improvement.
> 
>   For my part, I'd guess that at least 40 to 50% of my time is
> spent looking for memory allocation bugs in C++.
> 
>   If this isn't the case with you then, well, I suppose you're
> just the greatest darn programmer in the whole world.
> 
>  -PD
> --
> --
> Patrick Doyle
> doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca

40 to 50% is astounding.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Brett J. Stonier]

Paul Johnson wrote:

> Avis did rather well with "we try harder".  I don't think you can read
>
> too much into this.

Ah, but did they say "We try harder than those lazy Hertz guys."?  "We
try harder" is a positive statement that doesn't create defensiveness
and hostility.

> They were not competing in a standards war.
>
> Imagine that the Japanese cars, for some strange reason, had to be
> right-hand-drive models whereas the US standard is left-hand-drive (I
> do hope I've got that the right way round).  How many cars would they
> have sold then?

Exactly what do you mean by a standards war?  A fight to become the
standard programming language of choice?  I don't see that as a
standards war, like CORBA vs. COM, where one winning out precludes the
use of another.  Java getting really popular shouldn't keep people who
want to from using Eiffel.  Did you mean something else?

> So what do we do?  Shut up and be smug about how we know so much
> better?
>
> Java, I notice, is being hyped as an improvement on C++ (which it is).
>
> Why can't we hype Eiffel as an improvement on both?

No, if Eiffel is as good as you guys say, you *need* to hype it.  You
just need to do it more diplomatically.  I'd suggest something along the
lines of "Java is great for certain purposes, but Eiffel is better in
these situations for these reasons."  What I see come from Meyer and
others is more like "Java is a piece of crap, and Eiffel is the key to
the universe."  Cocky, sour grapes like that are not going to win *me*
over.  Most of the respondents to my original reply have given Java some
credit, saying things like "Well, Java's not evil; its a pretty good
language.  Its just that Eiffel is much better."  Run with *that*
attitude!

Brett S.
http://www.mtjeff.com/~calvin/devhbook

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Mike Charlton]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
> <3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
> > Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
> > experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
> > pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
> > percent.
> 
> If automatic memory management really cut down your development time by
> a factor of several, I hate to think of what on earth you were doing to
> waste that much time previously. Sure memory management problems can be
> persnickety, but if they are taking up 80% of your time, something is
> VERY wrong with the way you are writing programs.

A couple of people have said that Robert's statement is a cheap shot.  I'd
have to disagree.  I think the difference of opinion comes about from
different ways of measuring productivity.

Automatic memory management will surely not affect the requirements stage.
It should only slightly affect the design stage (the design will be different,
but you really don't have to spend all that much time worrying about memory
issues).  In coding, it will have some effect on productivity, but if you
have some experienced programmers, it shouldn't be more than 20-30% of the 
time (IMHO).  Back end testing shouldn't uncover too many issues (especially
if you have already used a memory checking program like Purify).  So again,
20-30% of your time should be plenty.

Support and maintenance is another question.  Tracking down memory problems
is a real pain.  In my experience, 10 or 15% of issues are memory related.
They also take an inordinate amount of time to deal with.  Making sure you
have good code reviews should keep this to a minimum, though.

Anyway, I agree with Robert.  If you are spending 80% (or even 50%) of your
time *for the whole project* on memory issues, you have some serious
problems (lack of code inspections and inexperienced people qualify as
serious problems with me).

I have worked with both large C++ projects and large projects using
a proprietary language with automatic memory management.  Yes, with C++
we spent a lot of time thinking about memory.  However, using automatic
memory management, we spent a lot of time thinking about performance.
I'd say it's a bit of a toss up.  No one solution will work well for
every problem.

           Mike

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Lee Webber]

On 28 Aug 1997 14:03:51 -0400, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
wrote:

>neil says
>
><<Eiffel has had that for years, so your productivity boost is only over the
>C languages. For the other several hundred percent you need to apply DBC,
>even if only methodologically.>>
>
>Any time that people claim giant factors in productivity improvements, they
>do the technology for which they make the claim a disservice.
[etc]

Here's the article to which neil was responding:

>James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
><3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
>> Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
>> experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
>> pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
>> percent.

Seeing the two together, it's obvious that neil was not making a
precise technical claim.  Leaving out what you did was a distortion of
his message.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Lee Webber]

On 28 Aug 1997 14:05:41 -0400, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
wrote:

>James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
><3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
>> Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
>> experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
>> pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
>> percent.
>
>If automatic memory management really cut down your development time by
>a factor of several, I hate to think of what on earth you were doing to
>waste that much time previously.

And here you ignored "and pointer protection".  There is more to
pointer problems than the premature release of objects.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Patrick Doyle]

In article <3406C0B0.546F@vineyard.net>,
Arthur Nelson  <art@vineyard.net> wrote:
>Patrick Doyle wrote:
>> 
>>   For my part, I'd guess that at least 40 to 50% of my time is
>> spent looking for memory allocation bugs in C++.
>
>40 to 50% is astounding.

  PLEASE share your techniques.  I could really use some help in
this area, it seems.

 -PD

PS.  Perhaps I should mention that I'm maintaining and upgrading
legacy code.  That's one main reason I spend so much time on
memory issues--the original programmer wasn't too concerned
with them.
-- 
--
Patrick Doyle
doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Samuel Mize]

Patrick Doyle wrote:
> 
> In article <fxrabd1l2c.fsf@boole.enst-bretagne.fr>,
> Laurent Guerby  <Laurent.Guerby@enst-bretagne.fr> wrote:
> >doylep@ecf.toronto.edu (Patrick Doyle) writes:
> >
> >   Ada has the ability to manipulate unconstrained objects (something
> >like returning dynamic sized objects/arrays) without requiring user
> >heap management. The greatly obviates the need for user
> >allocation/deallocation, you can write very large Ada programs without
> >doing fine grained heap management (and I agree with you, very error
> >prone unless you're some kind of programming deity ;-).
> 
>   I'm not sure I follow the Ada approach.  How do these "unconstrained
> objects" work?

Here's a very brief discussion (since this thread is so cross-
posted).  For more info, see the tutorials at www.adahome.com.

An Ada object must be constrained (have a definite size) when it
exists.  However, you can define a type that is not constrained.
Each object of that type gets its constraints when created.  If
a procedure parameter is unconstrained, it gets its constraints
from the value given when the procedure is called.

Here's a concrete example:

declare

  -- Define an integer-indexed array of characters.  We do NOT
  -- define the min or max indexes, or the size of the array.

  type Flex_Array is array (integer range <>) of character;

  A, B: Natural; -- integers greater than or equal to zero

  procedure X (F: in Flex_Array);
begin

  -- get values for A and B somehow
  ...

  declare
    Flex_A: Flex_Array (1..A);
    Flex_B: Flex_Array (3..B);
  begin
    X (Flex_A);
    X (Flex_B);
  end;
end;


Where Flex_A and Flex_B exist, they have well-defined sizes.
However, these sizes are defined at run time.

In the first call to X, F'First (the first array index) will be
1.  In the second call to X, F'First will be 3.  If B is less than
3, Flex_B is a null array, which is perfectly fine in Ada.

Sam Mize

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <3406C150.3EE5EE0E@stratasys.com> Jeff Kotula <jkotula@stratasys.com> writes:

> I'm not saying that Eiffel advocates shouldn't tone down their
> rhetoric, but the rest of us should probably open up a bit. We are,
> after all, supposed to be engineers/scientists and remain free of
> bias :)

Sounds good to me.  I note here that I really don't have a love affair
with any programming language.  Put another way, I feel they all suck
one way or another and that they need to be evaluated for each context
to see which one sucks the least for that context of use.  I also
favor (heresy of heresies) multi-language development in those (many,
imo) cases where it makes sense.  The thing that is annoying about
these ultra-fanatical Eiffel people, isn't Eiffel - it _is_ a language
that sucks less than many - it's that they basically have bought into
their own rhetoric that Eiffel is the absolute paragon of perfection
in PLs.  IMO, there are many perspectives from which it is not even
remotely close to this.  Take expressivity for example.  Compared to
CL/CLOS, Eiffel is about as expressive as the original BASIC.

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[James P. White]

Silvio Calissi wrote:
> 
> Paul Johnson wrote in article <5u61fk$e23$5@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>
> >Sun come along with Java, and suddenly it makes more progress in 1 year
> than
> >Eiffel has in its entire existence, despite being clearly inferior to
> >Eiffel on every ground that Eiffel has ever been criticized on.
> 
> Why did companies like SUN, MS, Borland, ... support JAVA instead of another
> (better) language. Do you think that they are stupid ? How can they be
> ignorant that this leads to the second historic mistake ?
> I really like to know some opinions on this.

*sigh*

Just to remind everyone again, a fundamental reason for Java's huge
current and future success is that Java is targeted to a platform
independent byte code delivered across networks in a secure manner (the
JVM - Java Virtual Machine).

A huge amount of debate rages around Java defeciency in not being the
perfect language.  It isn't, nor is it even possible to create such a
beast (remember the Tower of Babel?).  

And while Java as a language has some merits, it is a world beater and
destined for greatness because the JVM is the platform which enables the
age of the network (the one we are in the beginning of now) as x86/DOS
was for the IBM PC (which was the platform which enabled the age of the
personal computer which now history, and Intel and Microsoft won the
war).

An interesting footnote in this is the UCSD Pascal p-System which was a
platform independent system.  It was quite popular and enjoyed fair
success (without any marketing) and there was even a computer which had
a p-code CPU.  It's success came from being able to interoperate (at a
performance penalty) across all the popular platforms of the day (Apple
II, Z-80 CP/M [the x86/DOS of the day], DEC LSI-11, and quite a few
others).  It was wiped out by the IBM PC which made all those platforms
commercially uninteresting (and also spawned Turbo Pascal).

It remains possible that such a scenario could play out again.  The real
battlefield for this whole conflict is who will own the standard for the
winning platform in the 1billion unit installed base which is the
product of the network age (it will be dominated by set top boxes, smart
TVs, and NCs; personal computers as we know them will be less than 20%
of the entire market).  Microsoft has made all the right moves to
undercut the all-but-certain path that the JVM had for that and is
making great strides in shifting the direction back to Windows (CE that
is).  The WebTV is quite significant in this strategy and the outcome of
their $425million acquisition (it was supposed to be final but
apparently Justice is realizing maybe they made a mistake, which they
did in allowing it).  

But even with Windows CE being the OS winner, the JVM remains the
solution for application software because WinCE is CPU independent and
runs on the many different processors used in consumer electronics.  So
Microsoft plans to replace x86/DOS/Win with JVM/WinCE, and it is quite
likely the way it will turn out (naturally I would prefer a simple JVM
world, but then no one asked me...).

jim
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jay Martin]

Jon S Anthony wrote:
> 
> In article <3406C150.3EE5EE0E@stratasys.com> Jeff Kotula <jkotula@stratasys.com> writes:
> 
> > I'm not saying that Eiffel advocates shouldn't tone down their
> > rhetoric, but the rest of us should probably open up a bit. We are,
> > after all, supposed to be engineers/scientists and remain free of
> > bias :)
 
> Sounds good to me.  I note here that I really don't have a love affair
> with any programming language.  Put another way, I feel they all suck
> one way or another and that they need to be evaluated for each context
> to see which one sucks the least for that context of use. 

Seems reasonable.  My "roots" are in "programming in the large
with "non-brilliant programmers" so I prefer "anal", "hand holding",
"strongly typed" and simple languages.  Though I would love
to see my "beliefs" challenged by say stellar improvements in
productivity  studies using more "loose" languages on projects
consisting of say a few million lines of code and heh "room temperature" 
programming IQs.

>  I also
> favor (heresy of heresies) multi-language development in those (many,
> imo) cases where it makes sense. 

Multi-language development projects can be a pain and usually
more languages means even more pain. 

> The thing that is annoying about
> these ultra-fanatical Eiffel people, isn't Eiffel - it _is_ a language
> that sucks less than many - it's that they basically have bought into
> their own rhetoric that Eiffel is the absolute paragon of perfection
> in PLs.  

I have never used Eiffel but it looks to be a very good language
that has few compromises on "quality".

> IMO, there are many perspectives from which it is not even
> remotely close to this. Take expressivity for example.  Compared to
> CL/CLOS, Eiffel is about as expressive as the original BASIC.

It seems to me if you are doing "prototypes", short lived programs
and small programs, etc, then expressivity is a desirable
feature.  As you go into "a programming the large" situation, then
"expressivity" has its costs.  And it may just be my "roots"
but "large" situations seem much more challenging and critical
than "small programs" which can easily be dumped and rewritten.
I guess I find "unscalable" programming in the small
languages and programming philosophies less compelling than
"large" ones.


Jay

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Dennis Weldy]

 I would suggest this approach:
come up with a way to tie Eiffel to the Web. Were it not for the web, would
Java have such a large following?

Another query: is there an Eiffel compiler (EDK) which I can download?

Dennis


Paul Johnson wrote in article <5u61fk$e23$5@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>...

>In article <34059D8A.3F3B7FA4@brightwood.com>, bretts@brightwood.com
says...
>>
>>Ell wrote:
>
>>Since everyone is trying to give me a technological history lesson,
>>let's examine that for a second.  Has Burger King's or Pepsi's efforts
>>to defame their #1 competitors been successful?  Last I checked, they
>>are both still very much #2.  So, what we learn from this is that when
>>the #2 tries to dethrone the #1 by directly attacking it, it doesn't
>>seem to work well.
>
>Avis did rather well with "we try harder".  I don't think you can read 
>too much into this.
>
>>Now, how about an example of superior technology that won out?  Take the
>>Japanese car manufacturers of the 80s.
>
>They were not competing in a standards war.
>
>Imagine that the Japanese cars, for some strange reason, had to be 
>right-hand-drive models whereas the US standard is left-hand-drive (I 
>do hope I've got that the right way round).  How many cars would they 
>have sold then?
>
>>I am interested in Java and play with it, but I am
>>certainly not so delusional as to think it has yet fully arrived, is
>>suitable for air traffic control systems, or will ever solve the world's
>>problems.
>
>Some people are not as enlightned as you.
>
>Also, I think you might forgive us some frustration.  Eiffel has been
>around now for over 10 years, but is still very much a minority language.
>Sun come along with Java, and suddenly it makes more progress in 1 year
than
>Eiffel has in its entire existence, despite being clearly inferior to
>Eiffel on every ground that Eiffel has ever been criticised on.  
>Aaarrrggghhhh.
>
>>Yet when Eiffel proponents denounce it as a toy or a sham,
>>they insinuate that those who use it are not intelligent enough to make
>>the proper choice. 
>
>So what do we do?  Shut up and be smug about how we know so much better?
>
>Java, I notice, is being hyped as an improvement on C++ (which it is).
>Why can't we hype Eiffel as an improvement on both?
>
>Paul.
>
>-- 
>Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my
opinions. |
>+44 1245 242244         +-----------+--------------------------------------
---+
>Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of
little
>Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.
>
>.
> 

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Dennis Weldy]

 Of course, newspper reports never misquote, or misunderstand what was
stated. 
Evidently, Corel has a rebutal on its web page. What about that?

Dennis


Bertrand Meyer wrote in article <34048653.63DECDAD@eiffel.com>...

>James P. White wrote:
> 
>[Quoting me]
>> > It's really fascinating to read this again a month later,
>> > with the recent announcements -- widely reported by the
>> > press -- that Corel is dropping its Java strategy altogether.
>> >
>> > So much for the showcase success of the century...
>
>[James P. White]
>
>> As I am sure you will hear, those reports were entirely inaccurate.
>
>The Toronto Globe and Mail wrote that Corel was "ditching"
>Java efforts. This has been criticized on some newsgroups
>as being exaggerated. But here is the report from Computer
>Reseller News in Techwire (see
>http://192.215.107.71/wire/news/aug/0817corel.html
>for the full text):
>
>        OTTAWA -- Corel has rethought its Java strategy, 
>        according to sources briefed by the company.
>
>        Now, the plan is to put the bulk of application
>        logic on servers, which would then
>        serve up what's needed to the client, whether that client
>        is a PC or a Network Computer, said Amy Wohl, president
>        of Wohl Associates, a Narberth, Pa., researcher.
>
>        Previously, the company was rewriting its bread-and-butter
>        drawing and productivity applications in Java. But that
>        effort has been delayed significantly.
>
>        Corel now plans to use home-grown technology, code-named
>        Remagen [...]
>        
>        There still will be a lower-end Java suite for NCs due in
>        October, Wohl noted, but the thrust has shifted considerably
>        to the enterprise.
>
>The word "altogether" in "Dropping its Java strategy altogether"
>was based on the initial press reports and may turn out to be too
>strong. The jury is still out as to how "altogether" the drop is,
>although in the software business "delayed significantly" is often a
>euphemism for something more fatal. The point of my note (not a flame,
>just a reporting of fact) stands: that the great showcase of Java
>triumph, reported everywhere including in these newsgroups, was
>perhaps advertized a bit prematurely.
>
>See also: http://www4.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_799.html.
>
>-- 
>Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE Inc.
>ISE Building, 2nd floor, 270 Storke Road, Goleta CA 93117
>805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, <Bertrand.Meyer@eiffel.com>
>http://www.eiffel.com, with instructions for download
>.
> 

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Patrick said

<<  That's a pretty cheap shot, Robert.  Plus, it's not necessarily
true.  There are applications that just beg for automatic memory
management, and if they happend upon one of these, they certainly
could have seen such an improvement.

  For my part, I'd guess that at least 40 to 50% of my time is
spent looking for memory allocation bugs in C++.

  If this isn't the case with you then, well, I suppose you're
just the greatest darn programmer in the whole world.>>


Well different people have different styles in programming. I personally
like programming, but hate debugging, so I perfer to spend my effort
getting this right to start with. But I realize others prefer to spend
their time debugging -- it's a matter of taste partly -- although I
suspect that a lot of people do spend far too much time with a debugger.

It's interesting to ask a roomful of C and C++ programmers how mnay of
them routinely use a dynamic debugger. You will get pretty much a 100%
response, plus a reaction that the question is curious.

If you ask the same question in a roomful of Ada programmers, you will
find a split, somewhere close to 50/50. 

That's partly a language difference, but also partly a style difference.

Particularly in C++, proper abstraction and encapsulation should make
it possible to minimize problems with dynamic allocation. Now I must
admit that most C and to somewhat lesser an extent C++ programmers
seem blissfully unaware of what abstraction is all about.

As for applications where you can get a factor of several productivtiy
improvement by using garbage collection, I think that is rubbish. Remember
I speak here as someone who fully knows the vale of garbage collection.
I wrote the SPITBOL systems (see the paper in SP&E, 1977, which describes
the interesting approach SPITBOL uses to GC), and was deeply involved in
the Algol-68 design.

So I know the advantage, and it is consderable, but the idea that GC alone
could cut down the time to design/document/code/test/integrate/productize
a product by a factor of several seems ludicrous to me.

Perhaps you are just talking about coding time -- even there the estimate
is way high.

You do NOT have to be the "greatest darn programmer in the whole world" to
avoid wasting 40-50% of your time looking for memory allocation bugs in
C++, you just need to create the proper abstractoins in the first place.

Now to be fair, you may well be spending this time on other people's
poorly written code, in which case the blame lies elsewhere.

But if you think my comment is a cheap shot, then you are far from being
sufficiently aware of what can be achieved by proper software process,
and this does NOT require super duper clever programmers, it is something
that can be achieved by good management, and good choice of techniques,
languages, and tools, with typical competent programmers, not super stars.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Mike Coffin says

<<Rather than rely on sources that are notoriously unreliable when it
comes to technical information, how about just going to the source?>>

Several people on this newsgroup have (very reasonably) cautioned that
newspapers may not be the best source of information. I would like to
suggest that neither is the PR department of the company affected, which
is of course working to put the best possible spin on this situation!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <34072C68.DAFB500E@earthlink.net> Jay Martin <jaymmartin@earthlink.net> writes:

> Jon S Anthony wrote:
> > 
> > Sounds good to me.  I note here that I really don't have a love affair
> > with any programming language.  Put another way, I feel they all suck
> > one way or another and that they need to be evaluated for each context
> > to see which one sucks the least for that context of use. 
> 
> Seems reasonable.  My "roots" are in "programming in the large
> with "non-brilliant programmers" so I prefer "anal", "hand holding",
> "strongly typed" and simple languages.  Though I would love

That's quite reasonable for that sort of situation.  No argument.

> to see my "beliefs" challenged by say stellar improvements in
> productivity studies using more "loose" languages on projects
> consisting of say a few million lines of code and heh "room
> temperature" programming IQs.

As you've pointed out in the past - even if this were true, the chance
of getting verifying studies showing it is about as likely as being
hit by a meteorite...


> >  I also
> > favor (heresy of heresies) multi-language development in those (many,
> > imo) cases where it makes sense. 
> 
> Multi-language development projects can be a pain and usually
> more languages means even more pain. 

Yes, I know that's the traditional argument.  But shoehorning
inappropriate work into a language model not really supportive of it
is even worse.  Now, I don't claim you should have dozens of languages
or something - but 2 (or maybe even three in some cases) is not that
big of a deal.


> > IMO, there are many perspectives from which it is not even
> > remotely close to this. Take expressivity for example.  Compared to
> > CL/CLOS, Eiffel is about as expressive as the original BASIC.
> 
> It seems to me if you are doing "prototypes", short lived programs
> and small programs, etc, then expressivity is a desirable
> feature.

Absolutely.  But the (IMO extreme) importance of this in prototypes
(and prototypes /= final work) is largely unrecognized to the
detriment of subsequent quality in the "manufactured" version.


> As you go into "a programming the large" situation, then
> "expressivity" has its costs.

In general I think this is quite true.  But I don't see this as being
in any sort of conflict with my position.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Patrick Doyle]

In article <dewar.872872744@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Ell said
>
><<No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other factors.
>The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.>>
>
>No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with products
>is how superiority is measured.

  I disagree.  Superiority is subjective; success is due to marketing.

  If you don't think this is the case, then you have more faith in the
average consumer's IQ then I do.

 -PD
-- 
--
Patrick Doyle
doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jay Martin]

Patrick Doyle wrote:
> 
> In article <dewar.872872744@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
> >Ell said
> >
> ><<No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other factors.
> >The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.>>
> >
> >No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with products
> >is how superiority is measured.
> 
>   I disagree.  Superiority is subjective; success is due to marketing.
> 
>   If you don't think this is the case, then you have more faith in the
> average consumer's IQ then I do.

Fool! You are wrong by Robert Dewars definition!

"A winning or successful product is "superior". 

Proof by contradiction:
Suppose you have "inferior" product that is "successful". But by the above
axiom, the product must be "superior" and not "inferior" (contradition).
 
QED. 

Jay

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Ell said
> 
> <<No it isn't.  You can win with an inferior product due to other
> factors.
> The overwhelming evidence of which some refuse to accept.>>
> 
> No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with
> products
> is how superiority is measured.
> 
> The trouble is that technical people tend to think that wizz-bang
> technical
> features are what is important.

Still there are cases where an inferior product wins.
1) When what the consumer perceives as superior is actually inferior,
but the consumer doesn't notice before buying it. (Instability and
configuration hassles of Windows 3.x vs. Macintosh)
2) When what the consumer perceives as inferior never hits the market
because the market entry costs are too high, so the superior product can
never prove its quality. (MS-DOS vs. Eumel)
3) When a product is superior for a large partial market but inferior
for many niches, but the niche markets are too small to support a
separate development effort.
4) Customers don't know about better alternatives because the
alternatives are restriced to niches. (Windows NT vs. QNX)

Classical market theories don't work too well in practice, and they work
even less than that for software, for two reasons:
1) Compared to other products, software production costs have an unusual
structure:
Market entry (creating the software to be sold) is exceedingly high.
Production cost (copying the software for distribution) is near zero.
Distribution and marketing costs seem to be about normal.
The usual market theories assume products where the production cost is
relevant (to the least).
2) Software products are highly interdependent (or can easily be made
so). A market leader can improve his position by making his software
incompatible with products from other vendors, locking the customers
into his software zoo. (IBM did and does this, Microsoft started this no
long ago.)

> I saw an interview with one of the guys from the MIT Media lab a few
> years
> ago, saying that he thought that HDTV was completely mis-directed. His
> question: "Ask someone on the street what is wrong with TV, they will
> not
> say 'lack of definition'". I always remember this, because I thought
> it
> was an excellent lesson in not focussing on technical excellence.

Hmm... HDTV is what we'll get here in Europe. I remember there was some
conflict between European and US industries about which standard to use.
Don't tell me it has anything to do with the customers' desires - it's
more a question which company with what invention has its main sales
areas where.

Regards,
Joachim
-- 
Please don't send unsolicited ads.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[BruceMount]

Apparently Silvio Calissi wrote (I did not see the posting):
>
> Paul Johnson wrote in article <5u61fk$e23$5@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>
> >Sun come along with Java, and suddenly it makes more progress in 1 year
> than
> >Eiffel has in its entire existence, despite being clearly inferior to
> >Eiffel on every ground that Eiffel has ever been criticized on.
>
> Why did companies like SUN, MS, Borland, ... support JAVA instead of another
> (better) language. Do you think that they are stupid ? How can they be
> ignorant that this leads to the second historic mistake ?
> I really like to know some opinions on this.


Sun, Microsoft, Borland, etc. ARE in fact very smart companies.
However, it is important to realize that their goals may or
may not align with your goals as a technologist.

The major impetus behind Java is that it allows Sun,
Netscape, etc. to challenge the dominance of Microsoft
and Intel.  Period.  They want to do this so that they
can make money, which is totally fine with me.....I'd
like to make money too.

They need a proprietary technology (Java) so that they
can control/direct it's future as part of their overall
marketing play.  I personally think that Sun et. al. has
made a brilliant marketing play here.  I am not knocking
the value (or power) or marketing or making money.
Hell, I keep wishing *I'd* invented the Pet Rock.

However, I don't think we should kid ourselves about
it either.  Sun et. al. did NOT propose Java because
they thought it was "the best" technology.  They
proposed it because it was "good enough" and under
their control and cause they thought it could
fundamentally change the computer marketplace.
Eiffel was already in the public domain (thanks Bertrand)
and thus would not have served Sun's purpose.

As to why Eiffel has not been as successful in
the marketplace....I am surprised I even need
to answer this.  The combined total marketing
budgets of Tower, ISE, and SIG is a fraction
of what a single large department at Sun might
have.  Sun runs national ads for Java.  Sun
can have a publicist at every trade show....can
call every tech columnist.....The Eiffel
community can't afford that.

Actually, what surprises me is that Microsoft
hasn't latched on to Eiffel as part of their
"slow Java" campaign.  Eiffel is in the public
domain and they could either build their own
compiler or buy one.  Given the right promotion,
Microsoft could catapult Eiffel into a strong
competitor to Java which would be sufficient to
slow the moves of Sun and others.

--Bruce

-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
      http://www.dejanews.com/     Search, Read, Post to Usenet

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Patrick Doyle]

In article <dewar.872872168@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Patrick said
>
><<For my part, I'd guess that at least 40 to 50% of my time is
>spent looking for memory allocation bugs in C++.
>
>  If this isn't the case with you then, well, I suppose you're
>just the greatest darn programmer in the whole world.>>
>
>
>Well different people have different styles in programming. I personally
>like programming, but hate debugging, so I perfer to spend my effort
>getting this right to start with. But I realize others prefer to spend
>their time debugging -- it's a matter of taste partly -- although I
>suspect that a lot of people do spend far too much time with a debugger.

  Hey, I don't like debugging either...

>You do NOT have to be the "greatest darn programmer in the whole world" to
>avoid wasting 40-50% of your time looking for memory allocation bugs in
>C++, you just need to create the proper abstractoins in the first place.

  I'd love to know how.  Do you have any references to techniques
for this sort of thing?

>Now to be fair, you may well be spending this time on other people's
>poorly written code, in which case the blame lies elsewhere.

  Actually, in my case, that's true.  In fact, for the bulk of my
professional career, I've been upgrading legacy code, and I don't
really know much else, so maybe I'm overestimating my problems
with memory.

>But if you think my comment is a cheap shot, then you are far from being
>sufficiently aware of what can be achieved by proper software process,
>and this does NOT require super duper clever programmers, it is something
>that can be achieved by good management, and good choice of techniques,
>languages, and tools, with typical competent programmers, not super stars.

  Sure, but I still think it was a cheap shot.  Someone said "I spend
X amount of time finding memory bugs" and you said "then you must
be doing something terribly wrong".  Now that you've explained your 
reasoning, I think we're all better off.

 -PD
-- 
--
Patrick Doyle
doylep@ecf.utoronto.ca

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[James P. White]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Mike Coffin says
> 
> <<Rather than rely on sources that are notoriously unreliable when it
> comes to technical information, how about just going to the source?>>
> 
> Several people on this newsgroup have (very reasonably) cautioned that
> newspapers may not be the best source of information. I would like to
> suggest that neither is the PR department of the company affected, which
> is of course working to put the best possible spin on this situation!

That may be true is some general sense, but of course is not relevant to
the topic of this thread which is not the credibility of the source of
public information but rather the totally inaccurate report that Corel
had made a major shift or retreat in their Java strategy when in fact
what the company had said was that they were expanding their Java
efforts.

jim 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                        Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
Director of Technology Adventure Online Gaming http://www.gameworld.com
Developers of Gameworld -- Live Action Role-Playing and Strategic Games
jim@pagesmiths.com        Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Bert Bril]

James P. White wrote:
> 
> Robert Dewar wrote:
> >
> > James P. White <jim@pagesmiths.com> wrote in article
> > <3404670B.C3A2C4A2@pagesmiths.com>...
> > > Even though Java lacks anything as comprehensive as DBC, in our
> > > experience the simple matter of having automatic memory management and
> > > pointer protection has yielded a productivity boost of several hundred
> > > percent.
> >
> > If automatic memory management really cut down your development time by
> > a factor of several, I hate to think of what on earth you were doing to
> > waste that much time previously. Sure memory management problems can be
> > persnickety, but if they are taking up 80% of your time, something is
> > VERY wrong with the way you are writing programs.
> 
> Yes, there is something VERY wrong with the way most programmers (not me
> of course) write programs.

So, do the programmers decide not to use GC? That _is_ a major problem.
Because it's a design issue. And if the boost of GC is so large
somewhere, then they should get GC immediately there. For any serious
language there is GC available nowadays. And, e.g., in C++ you can now
even choose which parts you want to handle manually, and which part not
(see e.g. http://www.geodesic.com ).

It's always the same story. People find themselves in a badly managed
environment with bad QA, bad Design, bad everything. And then, of
course, the language is to blame. Java may be the best choice for a lot
of situations. But the evaluation of whether it is the best should be
kept separated from these managerial problems. If you have no QA: make
sure you get that first. You'll not make good software using Java then,
either.


Bert

-- de Groot - Bril Earth Sciences B.V.
-- Boulevard 1945 - 24, 7511 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
-- mailto:bert@dgb.nl , http://www.dgb.nl
-- Tel: +31 534315155 , Fax: +31 534315104

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jay Martin]

Bert Bril wrote:

> It's always the same story. People find themselves in a badly managed
> environment with bad QA, bad Design, bad everything. And then, of
> course, the language is to blame. Java may be the best choice for a lot
> of situations. But the evaluation of whether it is the best should be
> kept separated from these managerial problems. If you have no QA: make
> sure you get that first. You'll not make good software using Java then,
> either.

I don't agree.  Which tools are best is dependent on
the environment. Bozo environments need special restricted
tools that cater to their bozo natures.  Its best not to give
loaded guns to 3 year olds. Of course it is best
not have have "bozo environments" but the incompetent programmers
and managers in this (sewer) industry make that a pipe dream.

Jay

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <dewar.872872168@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> As for applications where you can get a factor of several productivtiy
> improvement by using garbage collection, I think that is rubbish. Remember

I find myself in complete agreement with you here - despite the
likelyhood that I am often seen as a GC fanatic.


> So I know the advantage, and it is consderable, but the idea that GC alone
> could cut down the time to design/document/code/test/integrate/productize
> a product by a factor of several seems ludicrous to me.

Again (though I find it hard to choke out, :-), I find that I must
agree.  Even a factor of 2 is rather hard to believe, let alone
"several factors".  Let's face, getting even a 10% advantage is a rare
thing.  OTOH, even a 10% advantage must then be characterized as a
"big deal".  Personally, I think GC varies anywhere from 0% to maybe
15-20% depending on the application characteristics.


> Perhaps you are just talking about coding time -- even there the estimate
> is way high.

Agreed.  The coding advantage is really the biggest win as you don't
have to put the same level of effort up front in ensuring things will
behave correctly wrt dynamic memory issues.


> You do NOT have to be the "greatest darn programmer in the whole
> world" to avoid wasting 40-50% of your time looking for memory
> allocation bugs in C++, you just need to create the proper
> abstractoins in the first place.

OK, I'm still choking, but again, I must agree...

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <dewar.872856497@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> Mike Coffin says
> 
> <<Rather than rely on sources that are notoriously unreliable when it
> comes to technical information, how about just going to the source?>>
> 
> Several people on this newsgroup have (very reasonably) cautioned that
> newspapers may not be the best source of information. I would like to
> suggest that neither is the PR department of the company affected, which
> is of course working to put the best possible spin on this situation!

Wise words - that apply at least as much to the _source_ of this
particular rumor's occurance here.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Paul Johnson]

In article <dewar.872872744@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu says...

>No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with products
>is how superiority is measured.

Careful: you are getting very close to defining "superiority" by success
in the market place, and then arguing that the consumers always make
the right choice because they always choose superior products.

I think it is quite reasonable to assert that "technical" superiority is
a real concept, and that it is separate from market success.  Conflating
these two concepts is dangerous.

Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz features,
it is a matter of doing a better job.

Paul.

-- 
Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my opinions. |
+44 1245 242244         +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Paul says

<<Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz features,
it is a matter of doing a better job.>>

Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
person who can judge is the consumer. The VHS vs Beta example is a good
one from this point of view. The tecnical folks at Sony thought that
image quality was *the* important technical quality. But they were wrong,
and they paid for their mistake. In fact playing time was much more
important to the public.

Now some techie may say "stupid public, they don't know what is important",
but it is such misjudgments by technical people on what is important that
leaves quite a trail of business disasters behind.

An interesting case is gathering steam now, there is a question of whether
the new digital TV transmission capability should be used for HDTV, or
more conventional channels. It is beginning to look more and more as though
the public and the hence the networks, prefer more conventional channels.

Now, no doubt some technical folks will get most upset that as a result
the wondrous x by y resolution of HDTV will never see the light of day,
but all this shows, if it happens, is that maybe picture quality is not
so important as other considerations -- a lesson that tecnical folk
*should* have learned from Beta vs VHS, but unfortunately did not (which
is why we keep getting this example misquoted as an example where technical
superiority did not win out).

And, going back to your definition, what does "doing a better job" mean?
Who judges this?

For example, given two VCR's, one with amazing new features, and the other
with solid reliability, which is doing the better job.

For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision of
what features are or are not important and thus constitute the basis
of answering this question!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Paul Johnson]

In article <5u6ovi$5kb$1@news2.digex.net>, ell@access4.digex.net says...
>
>Paul Johnson (paul.johnson@gecm.com) wrote:
>: In article <34059D8A.3F3B7FA4@brightwood.com>, bretts@brightwood.com says...
>: >
>: >Ell wrote:
>
>I did NOT write ANYTHING in this post.  <-- Except this.

Sorry about that.  The phrase "Ell wrote:" was written by "bretts", who's
post I was quoting.  I deleted Ell's text, but failed to delete the
attribution at the top.

Paul.

-- 
Paul Johnson            | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my opinions. |
+44 1245 242244         +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
Work: <paul.johnson@gecm.com>       | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
Home: <Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk>    | standards, all different.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

JOn said

<<Again (though I find it hard to choke out, :-), I find that I must
agree.  Even a factor of 2 is rather hard to believe, let alone
"several factors".  Let's face, getting even a 10% advantage is a rare
thing.  OTOH, even a 10% advantage must then be characterized as a
"big deal".  Personally, I think GC varies anywhere from 0% to maybe
15-20% depending on the application characteristics.
>>


Absolutely, gains of 10 or 20% are very significant and very important
to pursue. The trouble is that if people really start to believe the
"several hundred percent" or "order of magnitude improvement" claims,
they may overlook the achievable smaller bug significant gains.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Patrick said

<<PS.  Perhaps I should mention that I'm maintaining and upgrading
legacy code.  That's one main reason I spend so much time on
memory issues--the original programmer wasn't too concerned
with them.>>

OK, but then that says nothing about the inherent importance of this
particular issue. If you were working on code where an incompetent
original programmer had written all their floating-point formulae
thinking that real arithmetic was possible on machines, you might
be spending 40-50% of your time on that, but it does not prove
that as a generalization, this is an important general issue!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jeff Kotula]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Paul says
>
> <<Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz
> features,
> it is a matter of doing a better job.>>
>
> Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
>
> person who can judge is the consumer.

[snip]

This is too simplistic. Suppose a company markets and sells a particular

software product for X dollars. Supporting that product must, minimally,

cost less than X. To have a decent profit margin it has to cost way less

than X.

My point is that as a tool, programming languages must be effective
in 1) creating subjectively "good" products, and 2) creating them so
as to be maintainable and supportable at a (objectively) "low" cost.
Technical superiority is related to the latter.

Now, take a recursive step backward and realize that languages are
themselves marketed products and that's where the real confusion
comes from...

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with 
> products is how superiority is measured.
> ..[snip]..
> Often as CEO of ACT, I find that my most important task is to convince
> customers not that Ada is superior, they know that, but rather that
> they can choose Ada and be sure that support 

Since _all_ your products are Ada tools, it's not surprising that 
your customers know (or think) that Ada is superior.  The quote
you were answering, IMHO, referred to the situation where people
claim to be interested in the factors in which Ada's quality is 
proven--yet they continue to cling to the very language that is the
worst in those factors.

Yes, if a product (Beta, Edsel, whatever) is not what people want,
then you can certainly argue that it's not superior.  But when a
product is _exactly_ what they claim to want, yet they won't buy
it, what can you do then?

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Wes Groleau, Hughes Defense Communications, Fort Wayne, IN USA
Senior Software Engineer - AFATDS                  Tool-smith Wanna-be
                    wwgrol AT pseserv3.fw.hac.com

Don't send advertisements to this domain unless asked!  All disk space
on fw.hac.com hosts belongs to either Hughes Defense Communications or 
the United States government.  Using email to store YOUR advertising 
on them is trespassing!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Matthew S. Whiting]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
> person who can judge is the consumer. The VHS vs Beta example is a good
> one from this point of view. The tecnical folks at Sony thought that
> image quality was *the* important technical quality. But they were wrong,
> and they paid for their mistake. In fact playing time was much more
> important to the public.
> 
> .
> .
> .
>
> For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision of
> what features are or are not important and thus constitute the basis
> of answering this question!

Robert,

FWIW, I agree with you.  Unfortunately, by this success metric, Ada is
pretty much a failure.  Although, one could argue that insufficient time
has passed for the customer's decision to truly and completely be felt! 
:-)

Matt

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Martin Tom Brown]

In article <dewar.873171868@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu "Robert Dewar" writes:

> Paul says
> 
> <<Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz features,
> it is a matter of doing a better job.>>
> 
> Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
> person who can judge is the consumer. The VHS vs Beta example is a good
> one from this point of view. The tecnical folks at Sony thought that
> image quality was *the* important technical quality. But they were wrong,
> and they paid for their mistake. In fact playing time was much more
> important to the public.

The crucial factor which made VHS the business success was that VHS
built up a larger library of prerecorded films available (ie software).
Sony vastly underestimated the importance of software sales involved, 
and VHS courted the film producers so cornering the market.

Once you start judging by market success you get into the hairy zone
where having a marketting department which sounds plausible enough
to get people to buy, and a product cheap enough that it's too much
trouble to complain allows you to have a completely useless "success".
The early phase of pyramid selling scams fits this model.
 
> Now some techie may say "stupid public, they don't know what is important",
> but it is such misjudgments by technical people on what is important that
> leaves quite a trail of business disasters behind.

Misjudgements by marketting people are *far* worse.
I worked on a couple of projects which matched all specifications, 
but failed because the marketting research was entirely spurious.
It only became clear something was desparately wrong when the sales
people tried to sell the finished product.
 
> An interesting case is gathering steam now, there is a question of whether
> the new digital TV transmission capability should be used for HDTV, or
> more conventional channels. It is beginning to look more and more as though
> the public and the hence the networks, prefer more conventional channels.
> 
> Now, no doubt some technical folks will get most upset that as a result
> the wondrous x by y resolution of HDTV will never see the light of day,

You can already watch it on a (slightly) incompatible standard in Japan,
and there were test transmissions at least as early as '93

> And, going back to your definition, what does "doing a better job" mean?
> Who judges this?

The hard line answer is the one which adds most to the bottom line.
It doesn't matter how well it works provided people are satisified,
or at least content enough not to complain (too much).
 
> For example, given two VCR's, one with amazing new features, and the other
> with solid reliability, which is doing the better job.
> 
> For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision of
> what features are or are not important and thus constitute the basis
> of answering this question!

Most consumers are actually unable to drive their VCR's :(

There are many variables, people are too easily persuaded by adverts.
Software in particular is *very* vulnerable to creeping featurism,
at the cost of both robustness and useability. ie Bloatware.

Another pending technical superiority (and cost) versus marketting
power and low build cost fight is with the new 56k modem protocols. 
The present score is that one sort of works, and the other doesn't. 
However, it looks like the cheaper one will win.

Regards,
-- 
Martin Brown  <martin@nezumi.demon.co.uk>     __                CIS: 71651,470
Scientific Software Consultancy             /^,,)__/

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Veli-Pekka Nousiainen]

Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in article
<dewar.873171868@merv>...
> Paul says
> 
> <<Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz features,
> it is a matter of doing a better job.>>
> 
> Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
> person who can judge is the consumer. The VHS vs Beta example is a good
> one from this point of view. The tecnical folks at Sony thought that
> image quality was *the* important technical quality. But they were wrong,
> and they paid for their mistake. In fact playing time was much more
> important to the public.
> 
> Now some techie may say "stupid public, they don't know what is
important",
> but it is such misjudgments by technical people on what is important that
> leaves quite a trail of business disasters behind.
> 
<SNIPPEDY_SNIP>

I can *NOT* choose my programming language as a consumer of those
languages.
 * * * THIS IS NOT A CONSUMER DRIVEN MARKET * * *
It is my father (my boss) who is first persuaded by MicroS*it markedroids
to believe
that you can not possibly choose a niche product no matter how superior it
is.
And man, I tell U, U'd better take this C++ deal, otherwise other bosses
think that
you've lost your marbles and do not wanna that, do U ?!!

So here I was, stuck with pile of what I have known to be (IMO) a pile of
s*it.
I LEFT THE COMPANY and now I am working with the Finnish Eiffel
Distributor.
Call this position heaven first, but I should convince the bosses that:
hey man, whut you're using now, is not gonna work. Ask your workers !!
They'll tell that Eiffel (or Ada or ...) is better. Listen to them and keep
them
happy! Otherwise U may lose your best wo/men...

Whut have happened to me, I sound like a markedroid...
Goodbye real world, welcome virtuality.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> productivity  studies using more "loose" languages on projects
> consisting of say a few million lines of code and heh "room temperature"
> programming IQs.

You mean an IQ of 70 (Fahrenheit) or 35 (Celsius) ?

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Wes Groleau, Hughes Defense Communications, Fort Wayne, IN USA
Senior Software Engineer - AFATDS                  Tool-smith Wanna-be

Don't send advertisements to this domain unless asked!  All disk space
on fw.hac.com hosts belongs to either Hughes Defense Communications or 
the United States government.  Using email to store YOUR advertising 
on them is trespassing!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <dewar.873149189@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> JOn said
> 
> "several factors".  Let's face, getting even a 10% advantage is a rare
> thing.  OTOH, even a 10% advantage must then be characterized as a
> "big deal".  Personally, I think GC varies anywhere from 0% to maybe
> 15-20% depending on the application characteristics.
> >>
> 
> Absolutely, gains of 10 or 20% are very significant and very important
> to pursue. The trouble is that if people really start to believe the
> "several hundred percent" or "order of magnitude improvement" claims,
> they may overlook the achievable smaller bug significant gains.

Absolutely agreed.  The importance of this is really hard to
over-emphasize as you can lose site of very real and tangible gains.
Gains that are quite readily seen but are dismissed as not being "good
enough", simply because they aren't that "magic bullet" level
increase.  But the latter is largely a fiction and so you simply mire
yourself into non-progressing technology.  A 10% here a 20% there
etc. really begins to add up over the long term and eventually we
might actually get this "several factors" over the course of building
on these very real "small gains".  That's why the overly prevalent
"all or nothing" attitude in this business is so destructive and self
defeating.

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Mike Charlton]

Dave Sparks <Dave.Sparks@sisyphus.demon.co.uk> writes:

> >>>>> "MC" == Mike Charlton <mikechar@nortel.ca> writes:
> 
>   MC> ...
> 
>   MC> I have worked with both large C++ projects and large projects using a
>   MC> proprietary language with automatic memory management.  Yes, with C++
>   MC> we spent a lot of time thinking about memory.  However, using
>   MC> automatic memory management, we spent a lot of time thinking about
>   MC> performance.  I'd say it's a bit of a toss up.  No one solution will
>   MC> work well for every problem.
> 
> Are you saying that when you used C++ you spent so much time on
> memory management that you couldn't afford to think about performance?

I'm not sure if that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but in case
it wasn't -- the answer is "No".  We just didn't need to spend very much
time tweaking performance.  My point was that automatic garbage collection
makes life easier for you.  But it doesn't come for free.  You *can*
overcome performance difficulties, but I figure it takes about as much
effort as memory stuff using C++ (IMHO, anyway -- YMMV).

        Mike

P.S. Please note that the requirements for different projects vary
considerably.  What may constitue a performance difficulty in one project
may have no impact on another.  I'll use Java, Smalltalk, Eiffel (or
whatever) on projects for which thet make sense.  I'll also use C++ on
projects for which it makes sense (and it *does* occasionally :-)).

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Munck]

On Tue, 02 Sep 1997 18:50:52 -0700, "Matthew S. Whiting"
<whiting@epix.net> wrote:

>Robert Dewar wrote:
>> ...I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision
>
>FWIW, I agree with you.  Unfortunately, by this success metric, Ada is
>pretty much a failure.

I don't believe that the consumer/customer is really making
the decision.  Even stipulating that programmers and development
managers prefer C/C++/Java over Ada, the parties who depend
on the long-term reliability, maintainability, adaptability,
and transportability of their products -- upper management,
stockholders and investors, real customers, even future 
programmers and development managers -- are not being
given the facts and then making an informed decision.  In
fact, they don't even know that the issue exists.

Bob Munck
Mill Creek Systems LC  

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Dave Sparks]

>>>>> "MC" == Mike Charlton <mikechar@nortel.ca> writes:

  MC> Dave Sparks <Dave.Sparks@sisyphus.demon.co.uk> writes:
  >> >>>>> "MC" == Mike Charlton <mikechar@nortel.ca> writes:
  >> 
  MC> ...
  >>
  MC> I have worked with both large C++ projects and large projects using a
  MC> proprietary language with automatic memory management.  Yes, with C++
  MC> we spent a lot of time thinking about memory.  However, using
  MC> automatic memory management, we spent a lot of time thinking about
  MC> performance.  I'd say it's a bit of a toss up.  No one solution will
  MC> work well for every problem.
  >>  Are you saying that when you used C++ you spent so much time on
  >> memory management that you couldn't afford to think about performance?

  MC> I'm not sure if that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but in
  MC> case it wasn't -- the answer is "No".  We just didn't need to spend
  MC> very much time tweaking performance.  My point was that automatic
  MC> garbage collection makes life easier for you.  But it doesn't come
  MC> for free.  You *can* overcome performance difficulties, but I figure
  MC> it takes about as much effort as memory stuff using C++ (IMHO, anyway
  MC> -- YMMV).

The question _was_ rhetorical - the point being that when you have
one _huge_ problem, the other, smaller, problems disappear into
the background and can get forgotten.

We've been using a byte-coded interpreted language with mark-sweep
garbage collection for over ten years, and the GC costs are
typically about 1% of the total.  Individual GCs take less than
0.1 seconds with a 2Mb heap on a SUN SparcStation 5, which is not
a problem in our context.  We used to have performance problems,
but we solved them by re-engineering the application (delivering
the 10::1 improvement we'd had to promise to get the funding).
It's doubtful that this product would have been written in C or
C++, but if it had been I don't think it would ever have met our
current performance expectations.

We also have C and C++ code where memory management is a very
difficult problem, partly because some of the code involved is not
under our control.  This area also needs re-engineering, because
the risk of memory leaks is unacceptably high.  This
re-engineering will not be easy.

Java performance does seem to be poor at the moment, but I expect
it to improve.  Remember that at one time performance was cited as
the reason for routinely using assembly code rather than a
high-level language.  This claim is uncommon today, and I expect
to see a similar change in attitude over the choice of
fully-compiled or compiled-and-interpreted languages.

I do know of one case, from twenty years ago, where two versions
of a COBOL compiler were written simultaneously by two separate
teams.  One version was written in assembly code, while the other
used a purpose-designed compiled-and-interpreted language, which
was developed as part of the project (and never used for any other
purpose).  Each team beleived that its method was the better one,
and was determined to prove it.  When the initial versions of the
copilers were compared, the assembly-code version was faster.  A
month later, the compile-and=interpret team, using the
instrumentation that the interpreter made possible, had improved
their compiler's performance enough to beat the assembly-coded
version (where performance improvements could not be accurately
targeted).

(The requirement was to replace an earlier COBOL compiler badly
written by assembly-code programmers unwillingly using a
high-level fully-compiled language.)

-- 
Dave Sparks, Staffordshire, England

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Charles Ditzel]

Unfortunately the erroneous articles have caused confusion...and it nothing
as "fatal" as Mr Meyer imagines.

Try http://www.corel.com/javastrat/index.html.  This explains with a bit
more clarity what is going on.  Corel, when all is said and done, is 
INVESTING MORE HEAVILY IN JAVA.  Two projects "Remagan" and "Alta" with 
time to markets of Winter '97 and Spring '98 (according to their charts).

Overall - as ambitious (in many ways) as the Office Suite for Java - simply
they have rethought and adapted to the emerging Java competition (i.e. Lotus, 
Applix, etc.) and the new web-based groupware market.



Dennis Weldy wrote:
> 
>  Of course, newspper reports never misquote, or misunderstand what was
> stated.
> Evidently, Corel has a rebutal on its web page. What about that?
[more stuff deleted]
[Stuff from Mr. Meyer]
> >The word "altogether" in "Dropping its Java strategy altogether"
> >was based on the initial press reports and may turn out to be too
> >strong. The jury is still out as to how "altogether" the drop is,
> >although in the software business "delayed significantly" is often a
> >euphemism for something more fatal. The point of my note (not a flame,
> >just a reporting of fact) stands: that the great showcase of Java
> >triumph, reported everywhere including in these newsgroups, was
> >perhaps advertized a bit prematurely.
[stuff deleted]
> >Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE Inc.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96]

Robert Dewar <dewar@MERV.CS.NYU.EDU> writes:
>Paul says
>
><<Technical superiority is not just a matter of having gee-whiz features,
>it is a matter of doing a better job.>>
>
>Sure, but who judges what is a better job. The answer is that the only
>person who can judge is the consumer. The VHS vs Beta example is a good
>one from this point of view. The tecnical folks at Sony thought that
>image quality was *the* important technical quality. But they were wrong,
>and they paid for their mistake. In fact playing time was much more
>important to the public.
>
    I thought one of the biggest reasons that Beta didn't succeed was
    that Sony refused to license the technology in order to keep 100%
    of the market share (can you say "Apple?") and as a result there
    was less available material to view. VHS mostly won out because
    with lots of companies making players, lots of studios were
    willing to put out material on that format regardless of any
    technical superiority.

    Hence what the market really decided on was not a technical issue
    at all. It was more of a marketing blunder coupled with greed and
    stupidity. (Not that Sony would be the first or the last to ever
    make this mistake. The world is filled with such examples.)

>
>An interesting case is gathering steam now, there is a question of whether
>the new digital TV transmission capability should be used for HDTV, or
>more conventional channels. It is beginning to look more and more as though
>the public and the hence the networks, prefer more conventional channels.
>
    HDTV has a similar problem and I liked your earlier observation
    about asking the public what's wrong with TV and not having
    resolution be named number one. Sure: All things being equal, I'd
    rather get a sharper image on the screen. But I'd much prefer that
    Hollywood put out material that wasn't so pathetic, lame, vulgar
    and aimed at the lowest common denominator. If they would come out
    with a) lots of viewing material and b) better quality viewing
    material for HDTV, I might run out an buy a set. As it is, why
    waste the money - Beavis and Butthead will be just about as
    entertaining at lower resolution. (Maybe introduce the HDTV set
    along with a companion VCR & lots of movies formatted for it and
    put one on display in every Blockbuster? It'd take a lot of bucks,
    but I bet the public would run out and buy it if the combined unit
    cost could be kept under $500. Once you get a few million sets out
    there, broadcast will follow...)

    So to bring it back around to the topic of computer languages...

    Technical superiority isn't the only factor in the consumer's
    judgment about buying a computer language. Sometimes it's
    availability of material. I may like Ada better than C, but for
    lots of jobs, the only available compilers are C compilers, so
    that's what we use. (Can't stop everything and retarget an
    existing compiler - often takes too long or costs more than it's
    worth) The decision isn't technical (except insofar as the market
    itself may be considered a technical issue), it's based on other
    concerns that are not a failure of some engineer to anticipate
    what features I think will be important.

    I know Ada has lots of marketing problems that aren't technical in
    nature - not the least of which is incorrect perceptions on the
    part of lots of engineers. e.g. "govt mandate = bad" "Ada = committee
    design = bad" "dropping mandate = abandonment", etc, etc. I hear
    it right across the aisle and any attempts to correct the
    perception seem futile: "Ada is dead - I'm going with Java" Maybe
    it would be wise to make a few superficial changes to the
    language, give it a hip sounding new name, get some major software
    or hardware vendor to back it and start fresh?

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     ATT:        561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-96, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:        561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
===============================================================================
  "I saw a bank that said "24 Hour Banking", but I don't have that much time."
        --  Steven Wright
===============================================================================

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Wes says

<<Yes, if a product (Beta, Edsel, whatever) is not what people want,
then you can certainly argue that it's not superior.  But when a
product is _exactly_ what they claim to want, yet they won't buy
it, what can you do then?>>


listen harder!!

This must mean that they have some requirements that they are not
articulating clearly. For example, they prefer software written by
a big company like Microsoft, or they feel more comfortable using
tools that everyone else uses. These are requirements that are
just as important to people as simply looking at technical aspects.

Why do people pay Bayer large amounts of money for simple
chemicals that are available much cheaper from others -- well
they feel more comfortable that they are really getting what
they want with the Bayer name behind it, and of course Bayer
spends large amounts of money convincing people that they feel
this way (which does not necessarily mean that it is in an
inappropriate attitude).

Yes, it's sometimes frustrating that customers seem to make "illogical"
decisions. We often see people using Ada technologies that purely in
technical terms seem clearly inferior to GNAT by any objective analysis.
But there are many reasons for this. Often it is simply a matter of
personal relationships, if you have dealt with person X for a long
time, and trust them, and they have not let you down in the past, then
it's not at all unreasonable to depend more on that trust than on the
current technical state of tools.

Being in business is all about understanding how all these factors work
together and understanding not just the technical needs of customers,
but their complete set of requirements, and identifying the cases where
you can meet that complete set of requirements. We often end up 
suggesting people look at some other Ada technology if we feel that,
considering all the requirements in this general sense, the customer
might be better off with some non-GNAT solution. Of course, being a
service and support company, rather than a "heres-the-shrink-wrapped-
software-take-it-and-pay-for-it" business, we probably work harder to
make sure that we *do* meet all the needs of customers, since we need
them to feel they are getting value for their support contracts!

Anyway, as I say, I understand the frustration, many projects that could
be more successful if written in Ada are not, and those of us who know
that spend a lot of time asking ourselves how that can be fixed. Well
the answer is that it cannot be fixed generally, and the important thing
is to concentrate on an incremental approach, where you make sure that
current use of Ada *is* successful, and rather gradually increase the
awareness of these successes. I don't see any other approach that will
work!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Darren New]

In article <5ue2sn$32g$2@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>,
Paul Johnson <paul.johnson@gecm.com> wrote:

>I think it is quite reasonable to assert that "technical" superiority is
>a real concept, and that it is separate from market success.  Conflating
>these two concepts is dangerous.

Especially when the product being considered is a technical product
used by technical people, like a programming language or environment,
CM tools, etc. 

In these cases, I think it's often more of "how fast can I get
acceptably effective" as it is "how effective can I get in a given
time period".  These two can be quite different numbers, especially
when "acceptable effectiveness" is low enough and there's previous
experience involved.  E.g., I can be acceptably effective with K&R C
in many ways, even if spending a month learning Ada would make me 20
times as effective at the technical aspects of my job. In many cases, 
these types of decisions are made by default, or by managers also
considering the costs of tools without considering the costs of lack of
productivity from cheaper tools.

  --Darren

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Matthew says

<<FWIW, I agree with you.  Unfortunately, by this success metric, Ada is
pretty much a failure.  Although, one could argue that insufficient time
has passed for the customer's decision to truly and completely be felt!>>

Not at all, do not equate success with market domination. Rolls Royce does
not sit around thinking they are a failure because they have only a sliver
of the market. Now sure they would like to sell more cars, but their goal
is to increase that sliver, not nudge out GM and Toyota!

Success for Ada is measured the same way. Many projects are highly successful
using Ada, and it has a significant sliver of users who are convinced that
they have found the Rolls Royce of programming language technology for their
needs, and hopefully these days not at Rolls Royce prices.

To increase the success of Ada, you want to focus on increasing the sliver,
don't spend time moaning over the fact that more copies of Visual C++ are
sold -- it's not a productive way to spend your time!

happens too often to call it historic

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> <<Yes, if a product (Beta, Edsel, whatever) is not what people want,
> then you can certainly argue that it's not superior.  But when a
> product is _exactly_ what they claim to want, yet they won't buy
> it, what can you do then?>>
> 
> listen harder!!
> This must mean that they have some requirements that they are not
> articulating clearly. 

Taking your advice, I think those unarticulated  wants  are
1. I want to believe that <tool/product/language> is always the most
   <reliable/low-cost/other attribute> choice for such things.
2. I do NOT want to see or hear any sort of studies that might
   threaten that belief.

And yes, there are people who would put Ada or Eiffel in the first
set of brackets.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Wes Groleau, Hughes Defense Communications, Fort Wayne, IN USA
Senior Software Engineer - AFATDS                  Tool-smith Wanna-be
                    wwgrol AT pseserv3.fw.hac.com

Don't send advertisements to this domain unless asked!  All disk space
on fw.hac.com hosts belongs to either Hughes Defense Communications or 
the United States government.  Using email to store YOUR advertising 
on them is trespassing!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Jon said

<<Absolutely agreed.  The importance of this is really hard to
over-emphasize as you can lose site of very real and tangible gains.
Gains that are quite readily seen but are dismissed as not being "good
enough", simply because they aren't that "magic bullet" level
increase.  But the latter is largely a fiction and so you simply mire
yourself into non-progressing technology.  A 10% here a 20% there
etc. really begins to add up over the long term and eventually we
might actually get this "several factors" over the course of building
on these very real "small gains".  That's why the overly prevalent
"all or nothing" attitude in this business is so destructive and self
defeating.>>

You don't even need to let them "add up", a single 10% gain is highly
valuable. Anyone who does not think so is welcome to send me a check
for 10% of the cost of their next software project on the grounds that
they will not notice the difference (but I will :-)

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Jon S Anthony]

In article <dewar.873477226@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> Jon said
> <<<
> yourself into non-progressing technology.  A 10% here a 20% there
> etc. really begins to add up over the long term and eventually we
> might actually get this "several factors" over the course of building
> on these very real "small gains".  That's why the overly prevalent>>>
> 
> You don't even need to let them "add up", a single 10% gain is highly
> valuable.

Right.  What I meant above was "adding up" across a sequence of
technologies giving such increments, not adding up on a project.

> Anyone who does not think so is welcome to send me a check
> for 10% of the cost of their next software project on the grounds that
> they will not notice the difference (but I will :-)

Exactly.  Hey, I'll take 10% of your 10% and will be a very happy
camper!

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178, 617.484.3383 
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
>An interesting case is gathering steam now, there is a question of whether
>the new digital TV transmission capability should be used for HDTV, or
>more conventional channels. It is beginning to look more and more as though
>the public and the hence the networks, prefer more conventional channels.

How has public opinion actually been obtained about this?

One thing sticks in my craw:  surveys in Australia, going back 100 years,
have shown that what people _want_ in the media (the newspapers 100 years
ago, TV nowadays) is science/medicine/technology, commerce/politics, and
sport, IN THAT ORDER, with quite a wide gap between the >50% who want science
stories and the <50% who want sport.  What we *get* is more and more and more
sport.  I believe British surveys show much the same order of preference,
with much the same total disregard of user preference in what actually gets
shown.

Ok, the source of my information about such surveys is New Scientist
magazine, which may be biassed!  But I well remember hearing on New
Zealand radio some 20 years ago that more people in New Zealand (then
famous as the land of "Rugby, Racing, and Beer") actually _went_ to
museums and art galleries than went to sports events.

Quite recently, in New Zealand, the "provincial" network was shut down.
The plan was to replace it with a channel devoted to ``music'' for teenagers,
a group who I believe are already well served in that regard.  That was not
_audience_ preference, it was _advertiser_ preference.

So is it really *the public* who want more conventional channels, or
is it *the advertisers*?  And if it is the public, how many of them who
have been asked for their preference have actually _seen_ HDTV?  (For
comparison, many of the people who ``choose'' PCs have never actually
_seen_ a Macintosh, and certainly have never used one.  And many of the
people who ``choose'' Windows have never seen NextStep.  And so on.)

>For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision of
>what features are or are not important and thus constitute the basis
>of answering this question!

This is of course the point of usability engineering.  But I am not very
happy about relying on people to make decisions about features they have
never had a chance to evaluate.

-- 
Unsolicited commercial E-mail to this account is prohibited; see section 76E
of the Commonwealth Crimes Act 1914 as amended by the Crimes Legislation
Amendment Act No 108 of 1989.  Maximum penalty:  10 years in gaol.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Richard says

<<"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@GOANNA.CS.RMIT.EDU.AU> writes:
<snip>
>So is it really *the public* who want more conventional channels, or
>is it *the advertisers*?  And if it is the public, how many of them who
>have been asked for their preference have actually _seen_ HDTV?  (For>>

Most definitely it is the public. Advertisers are only happy if people
WATCH the programs they advertise on! More channels per se is of no
possible interest to advertisers UNLESS more channels draw more viewers.

The above note is a bit plaintiff, it seems to read "surely, surely the
public would prefer our wonderful new technology, if only they could
appreciate how wonderful it is. If they don't it must be because of some
evil third party.":

Many techie companies have gone bust because they knew better than the
consumer what the consumer wanted.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Mark S. Hathaway]

> In article <5v0kta$jdb$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>,
> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>>An interesting case is gathering steam now, there is a question of whether
>>the new digital TV transmission capability should be used for HDTV, or
>>more conventional channels. It is beginning to look more and more as though
>>the public and the hence the networks, prefer more conventional channels.
 
> How has public opinion actually been obtained about this?
> 
> One thing sticks in my craw:  surveys in Australia, going back 100 years,
> have shown that what people _want_ in the media (the newspapers 100 years
> ago, TV nowadays) is science/medicine/technology, commerce/politics, and
> sport, IN THAT ORDER, with quite a wide gap between the >50% who want science
> stories and the <50% who want sport.  What we *get* is more and more and more
> sport.  I believe British surveys show much the same order of preference,
> with much the same total disregard of user preference in what actually gets
> shown.
>...
> So is it really *the public* who want more conventional channels, or
> is it *the advertisers*?  And if it is the public, how many of them who
> have been asked for their preference have actually _seen_ HDTV?  (For
> comparison, many of the people who ``choose'' PCs have never actually
> _seen_ a Macintosh, and certainly have never used one.  And many of the
> people who ``choose'' Windows have never seen NextStep.  And so on.)

>> For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision
>> of what features are or are not important and thus constitute the
>> basis of answering this question!

> This is of course the point of usability engineering.  But I am not very
> happy about relying on people to make decisions about features they have
> never had a chance to evaluate.

It happens all the time. Sometimes the results are good and sometimes
a failure. We have no choice but to make decisions about the unknown.
Take for example the founding fathers of the United States of America.
They fantasized about a new form of government and then argued quite a
lot about it...then they created it. Even today we're still critiquing
some of their decisions/choices.

I agree a lot of decisions are based on incomplete information or
they're given survey questions which "lead" them to answer the way
the surveyer wants. Polling is an art which seeks to not only get
a perfect sample group, but to get the sample group which will then
answer the questions the "appropriate" way.

The fact the rich people of the world will control such things isn't
new. Get used to it.

Among the most worrisome things is topics and events which are never
discussed (meaning the media and politicians don't talk about them).
If something doesn't appear on a poll the you can't give your opinion
and the poll won't reflect any thoughts on that topic. If your
representative in the government doesn't hear from you (with your cash
donation) and doesn't actually have much in common with you (as a human)
then he/she isn't likely to be thinking about the same concerns you
have. If the system doesn't present you an option then it's not likely
you can choose it, can you?

Take for example Michael Moore's television show (TV Nation). There
were apparently several episodes he wanted to air that were stopped.
Some advertisers were offended by his "message" and, in the end, this
lead to his whole show disappearing.

The "establishment" most often shows it's stodgy side when a "movement"
tries to enforce a change which the establishment hadn't offered. The
"civil rights" movement was one such "cause". The "ending of the Vietnam
War" was another.

Could you imagine the angst the powerful people of the "Western world"
would feel if a movement to overturn our republics in favor of a true
democratic type of governing were to occur. Their power would be
threatened and they wouldn't like it.

But, these problems won't appear for us to consider. They're not
offered-up to us to choose. They don't enter the minds of many people.
A movement isn't likely to begin if the idea(s) don't enter the minds
of some people.

Whatever the movement (civil rights, equal rights, gay rights,
environmental protection, nuclear-free society, worker rights, etc.)
the establishment didn't propose it and does oppose it.

Same as it ever was...

                                     Mark S. Hathaway

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Tim Ottinger]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> No you can't win with an inferior product, winning or success with
> products
> is how superiority is measured.

I think this is a sad statement. Is the ability to generate revenue the
only kind of superiority?

For a company banking on a product, that's the "most important thing",
granted.

It leads us to think that only market leaders are of value to us. By
this statement, we should never have left the Z80-CPU CP/M machines. One
time, the PC was just a new idea. Likewise the Mac. Once there was no
UNIX market, so we should have stayed with the mainframes.

It leads us to think that there is nothing valuable about products which
did not win market share because of poor packaging or marketing.  In
fact, it seems to "prove" that all research projects are inferior, and
therefore invalid, because they're not focused on generating revenue,
but on developing technically-superior solutions. But research is very
valuable. It leads to new generations of revenue-producing products.

Technical superiority and market dominance are clearly not the same
thing. They're not even clearly related.  No product has ever failed
because it was built well. Some have succeeded even though they weren't.

Blaming fitness-to-market problems on engineers is often also futile,
because most engineers receive their specifications from marketing
departments, and do not invent them for themselves. Also, engineers tend
not to participate in the success of their products in any way (other
than continuing to draw the same paycheck because the company doesn't go
under). They often have neither a say in the product direction, nor a
stake in the game, nor the opportunity to meet real users.

A business seems to me to have to provide a well-balanced compromise
between concerns. Inappropriate focus on one concern to the exclusion of
the other seems to be a bad idea. But not because the thing you focused
on was unimportant. Rather because you should have doneone, without
forsaking the other.

> [...]
> I saw an interview with one of the guys from the MIT Media lab a few
> yearsago, saying that he thought that HDTV was completely
> mis-directed. His question: "Ask someone on the street what is wrong
> with TV, they will not say 'lack of definition'". I always remember
> this, because I thought it was an excellent lesson in not focussing on
> technical excellence.

Also, Stephen Poplawski (the inventor of the first blender-like device)
was told that there was no market for his device because it didn't help
to capture the soda fountain market. He lost out on millions of
potential dollars when Fred Osius developed and marketed a similar
device with Fred Waring (the Waring Blendor).

Likewise, Elisha Grey was told by the telegraph company that employeed
him that there was no need in the world for voice communications. This
led to his not patenting the device for many months, and Alexander Bell
beating him to the punch.

People don't know what they want. They don't know what they need. Until
a product has hit the market, it's often impossible to tell if it's
really useful and good or not. And useful and good products fail all of
the time due to marketing and management. Superiority is no guarantor of
success, and neither is inferiority. There are too many variables.

After all, a weak, buggy, incomplete, and nearly unusable product I've
heard of is (in a marketing sense) superior to a clean, tight, useful,
complete, and comfortable product I've never heard of. At least by your
definition of marketing success being the definition of success.  This
seems a balancing act.

If superiority is created on full-page, glossy add pages in magazines,
we can all give up design, hack away, and quit testing code now.  ;-)

Tim

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Tim Ottinger]

Not all brilliant people are always pleasant people, granted, and
language wars are either dull or inflammatory, but let's not lose
perspective.

Meyer is brilliant. If you read his books or articles with your
"language war filter" on full blast, you find that he has many wonderful
ideas and a very solid foundation for his thoughts and even his stronger
opinions. I learn something everytime I take a look at his Eiffel book.

He did create a powerful construct in "design by contract". He did
create a powerful language to support it. He's said more than once that
DBC seems to him to be more important than all the rest of the OO-ness
supported by modern OO languages. I'm sure that he's very proud of his
accomplishments, and it's embittering to see language developers and
users staying away in droves.

I'm sure that Meyer has driven people away by some of his postings, and
I'm sure that that's also a horrible shame. But people should try to
separate their bias against the man from their bias against the ideas or
products that he's developed.

> > However, from a fairly unbias observer's standpoint on these Eiffel
> vs.
> > Java threads,
>
> More accurately, it's Eiffel vs. The World.
>
>  I am saying that the Eiffel proponents are taking the
> > wrong approach.  Most of the threads have been kicked off by posts
> by
> > Meyer, who presents an arrogant, condescending attititude towards
> Java.
>
> ^^^^^
> _anything_

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Tim Ottinger]

> - Better support for OOP?
>   Objective-C provided things like save/load for objects.

So you consider saving and loading to be an OO aspect of programming?
That's very unusual. I don't consider this to be an OO aspect at all,
but a general programming need.

Moreover, from an OO perspective, I personally find it distasteful for
business objects to have anyknowledge of presentation or persistence.
This even further created confusion over the idea of save/load methods
in objects being OOP.

Finally, I can have save/load methods in objects if I really wanted to.
What does Objective-C add to ease the burden and support the
aftermarket? I actually don't know, so this is a chance to explain or
evangelize.

Care to comment? I'd love to hear your perspective.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Ell]

Tim Ottinger (tottinge@dave-world.net) wrote:
: 
: People don't know what they want. 

Believe me most people _do_ know what they _want_.

: They don't know what they need. 

Never?  In all cases?  So only the engineers can tell us what they need? 
This is a lot like the statement your president RMartin made that "the
engineers should determine the domain model". 

I think you are wrong to make such an uqualified assertion.  If you said: 
"They _sometimes_ don't know _precisely_ what they need", you would
be a lot closer to the truth, imo.

Elliott
-- 
"The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
"We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central: http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Des said

<<> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> One thing sticks in my craw:  surveys in Australia, going back 100 years,
> have shown that what people _want_ in the media (the newspapers 100 years
> ago, TV nowadays) is science/medicine/technology, commerce/politics, and
> sport, IN THAT ORDER, with quite a wide gap between the >50% who want science
> stories and the <50% who want sport.  What we *get* is more and more and more
> sport.  I believe British surveys show much the same order of preference,
> with much the same total disregard of user preference in what actually gets
> shown.>>


Sorry, Robert Dewar did not write that (nothing sticks in his craw, it is not
a phrase he would use :-) :-)

SO, you need to check attributions here.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

<<Also, Stephen Poplawski (the inventor of the first blender-like device)
was told that there was no market for his device because it didn't help
to capture the soda fountain market. He lost out on millions of
potential dollars when Fred Osius developed and marketed a similar
device with Fred Waring (the Waring Blendor).

Likewise, Elisha Grey was told by the telegraph company that employeed
him that there was no need in the world for voice communications. This
led to his not patenting the device for many months, and Alexander Bell
beating him to the punch.>>

These are all examples that support my point, i.e. products which have
won out in the market place. The PC is another example of a product that
won out in the market place. I do not understand why you are using
examples like this that so clearly support my point as an argument against
it -- confusing!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Tim Ottinger wrote:
> I think this is a sad statement. Is the ability to generate revenue
> the
> only kind of superiority?

Sad or not, this is the way Reality works.
Nobody said that evolution will produce the nicest or most aesthetic
results. The survivors are the meanest, toughest, and most egoistical
traits, moderated only by the fact that cooperation can reap immense
benefits. This is so in biology, and this is so in economy.

> It leads us to think that there is nothing valuable about products
> which
> did not win market share because of poor packaging or marketing.

Commercial success and inherent value have no intrinsic connection. The
only connection that exists is that inherent value can help (and often
does help) for commercial success.
So doing your work well does help in the success of the products you're
working on, but you shouldn't be so megalomaniac to assume that this is
the single criterion for the product to succeed. If that were the case,
all those marketing guys could quit working right now, just as you
proposed to quit testing... the truth is in the middle. All have to do
their work, and your success depends on the efforts of the marketing
guys as well as their success depends on your effort. (I've heard
salesmen complaining about the rubbish they have to force on the
customers... I guess they routinely curse all those software developers
who produce rotten, difficult to use, buggy, and unfit software they
have to sell. And so software engineers and sales people can curse each
other until hell freezes over, and nobody thinks about *improving* the
situation at his shop.)

> In
> fact, it seems to "prove" that all research projects are inferior, and
> therefore invalid, because they're not focused on generating revenue,
> but on developing technically-superior solutions. But research is very
> valuable. It leads to new generations of revenue-producing products.

Yes. But don't expect companies to do much research other than research
resulting in immediate improvements of a product. This company research
can even be harmful to public welfare; I remember having read that the
tobacco companies did something with the acidity of the smoke of their
"light" cigarettes to make them more addictive. I was not surprised to
read about this - it's the sort of thing companies do to improve their
income.
This tendency for egoistical acts is a very common trait in capitalistic
companies (and I think in any other organized endeavour). The only
countermeasure are laws and a culture that puts guilt on such behaviour.
This doesn't totally prevent amoralic behaviour, but it helps.

Sorry, life ain't easy or nice... there were no promises when you
started life, or?

Regards,
Joachim
-- 
Please don't send unsolicited ads.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Des Kenny]

In article <5v0kta$jdb$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>, ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au
(Richard A. O'Keefe) wrote:

> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> One thing sticks in my craw:  surveys in Australia, going back 100 years,
> have shown that what people _want_ in the media (the newspapers 100 years
> ago, TV nowadays) is science/medicine/technology, commerce/politics, and
> sport, IN THAT ORDER, with quite a wide gap between the >50% who want science
> stories and the <50% who want sport.  What we *get* is more and more and more
> sport.  I believe British surveys show much the same order of preference,
> with much the same total disregard of user preference in what actually gets
> shown.

  Just swallow, or you'll get a very sore throat.
  You could always organise a mass boycott, that would be an interesting 
  empirical test.

> Ok, the source of my information about such surveys is New Scientist
> magazine, which may be biassed!  But I well remember hearing on New
> Zealand radio some 20 years ago that more people in New Zealand (then
> famous as the land of "Rugby, Racing, and Beer") actually _went_ to
> museums and art galleries than went to sports events.

  "We" exported all the Rugby players, Racing has to compete with the "Pokies"
   and the Casinos; and the Beer all gets exported too. "They're drinking
our beer
   over there ...", or so the promoters keep telling us, maybe it's a hoax.

   "We" all drink wine now. Sigh, how the mighty are fallen!
    -- Marlborough Chardonnay, don't you know, if you can afford it or find it,
    -- no doubt it will all be exported too.

   I am working with some people to figure out a way to export our politicians,
   and are having a great deal of trouble finding a market for this
"priceless" commodity.
   -- Any offers? 
   -- Be in before the price falls too low, or how are you to resell them
at a profit?
   -- No, we are not taking swaps!
   

 "We" are currently building yet another national museum in Wellington,
  the largest museum under construction in the world today. More taxpayers
  money, nobody asked me, not that they ever do.

  I recall visiting the Smithsonian in Washington DC
  (and wishing I had another month), the Los Angeles Natural History Museum,
  The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, ... it seems to be a major addiction
alright!

   Maybe "we" just like to look backwards, who knows? Maybe its a national
   disease? I wonder if we learn anything from it all? Still, its fun.
  
  I guess it beats waiting at bus stops and airline terminals.

> Quite recently, in New Zealand, the "provincial" network was shut down.
> The plan was to replace it with a channel devoted to ``music'' for teenagers,
> a group who I believe are already well served in that regard.  That was not
> _audience_ preference, it was _advertiser_ preference.

  Yep, there are media formulas to work out the advertising revenue down to the
  millisecond. It is all very carefully planned and packaged for maximum
marketing
  impact and financial return.

  There is a debate going on now in parliament about reducing advertising
time on "state"
  TV channels;  and we are talking millions of dollars a minute in lost
revenue to the
  "state", the government has gone away to count its pennies.

  You can always vote with your feet, and "persuade" others to do
likewise. Start
  your own radio station. Access Radio started in Wellington several years ago
  to give voice to "the people", of all races, cultures, persuasions,
religions, hobbies, 
  and other bizzare pastimes.

  It is run by "amateurs", in the original sense of the word, and there are now 
  Access Radio locations in all the major cities of the country. You can
hear almost
  every language on earth spoken on Access Radio. We don't have Inuit yet,
  or even any Aboriginee, that I have heard anyway, give it time.
  "Where there's a will..."

  IMO the BBC seems to be one of the few electronic media organisations in the
  world that can consistently produce very high quality big programs year
after year.
  I am not sure why they do it, or how they even get away with it. The
real reasons
  are probably lost in the mists of antiquity -- more museums.
  
 
> So is it really *the public* who want more conventional channels, or
> is it *the advertisers*?  And if it is the public, how many of them who
> have been asked for their preference have actually _seen_ HDTV?  (For
> comparison, many of the people who ``choose'' PCs have never actually
> _seen_ a Macintosh, and certainly have never used one.  And many of the
> people who ``choose'' Windows have never seen NextStep.  And so on.)

  More mass media => more mass persuasion,
  so what's new over the last million years?
  -- he types on his trusty 8 year old Mac II Ci
  -- I must upgrade one of these days when Apple finally decides
  -- which is the right way to the promised land
  -- maybe I'll even get to take a NextStep, ....?
  -- I'll probably use NT, various Unixes, Linux, ..., even QNX, ...
  -- if they are suitable for some project
  -- To use that old phrase from generations of NZ Racing wisdom
  --  "It's horses for courses"

  
> 
> >For me, I would far rather rely on the consumer to make the decision of
> >what features are or are not important and thus constitute the basis
> >of answering this question!

 Chacun a son gout; and there are many gouts, vive la difference!

> This is of course the point of usability engineering.  But I am not very
> happy about relying on people to make decisions about features they have
> never had a chance to evaluate.

People have been doing that forever. Wait for the next leap in human
mental evolution,
it may change; if you are lucky.

> Unsolicited commercial E-mail to this account is prohibited; see section 76E
> of the Commonwealth Crimes Act 1914 as amended by the Crimes Legislation
> Amendment Act No 108 of 1989.  Maximum penalty:  10 years in gaol.
> Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

I am collecting all this "unsolicited email" for the next BIG museum, in
New Zealand, it will be called the Cyber Junk Yard. I will bequeath it to
future anthropologists, and students of mass psychosis; not to be open
until January 1, 3001; it should keep them busy for a little while.

Regards

Des Kenny

Information Systems Consultant

Email:             dkenny@actrix.gen.nz 
Phone[Cell]:       64 21 610 220
Fax[Modem]:        64 4 476 9237
PO Box[Snail]:     17356, Wellington, New Zealand

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Des Kenny]

In article <1997Sep13.115308.12917@hobbit>, hathawa2@marshall.edu (Mark S.
Hathaway) wrote:


> 
> Whatever the movement (civil rights, equal rights, gay rights,
> environmental protection, nuclear-free society, worker rights, etc.)
> the establishment didn't propose it and does oppose it.
> 
> Same as it ever was...
>

Too true. 

You might even call this the "Law of Social Inertia", to paraphrase
Newton; and it goes back a little while. Here are some more recent,
recorded, examples ...

1. "History" tells us that Pythagoras sentenced his young student Hippasus
to death by
   drowning for unforgiveably discovering "irrational" numbers; and thus
threatening the demise
   of his "master's" great work and reputation.
   -- He was not the first, or the last, "authority" to "eliminate" those
with radical
   -- ideas that might disturb the holy slumber of that great god "Status Quo".

2. The Catholic Church and Gallileo, and Copernicus and so on ...
   -- Not to mention a few other "Religions" and "Powers" over the centuries
   -- To be fair it is not always "Religions" as such that have "sinned"
   -- "Who will rid me of this priest?"
   -- Henry II giving the barely code signal that sanctioned the murder of
Thomas a Becket
   -- in his own cathedral
 

3. Many composers and authors were villified until after their death and then
   were miraculously "discovered" to be "brilliant".



4.  A rather more recent film/docudrama on this same subject:-
    "Manufacturing Consent"
     Producer: Noam Chomsky,
               -- One time linguist and developer of the "Chomsky Grammars"

Regards

Des Kenny

Information Systems Consultant

Email:             dkenny@actrix.gen.nz 
Phone[Cell]:       64 21 610 220
Phone[Home]:       64 4 476 9499
Fax[Modem]:        64 4 476 9237
PO Box[Snail]:     17356, Wellington, New Zealand

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Tim Ottinger]

Ell wrote:

> Tim Ottinger (tottinge@dave-world.net) wrote:
> : People don't know what they want.
> Believe me most people _do_ know what they _want_.

No. Most people see a thing and then decide they want it. Most companies
want "market share". Like Poplawski's company wanted to corner the
market on soda fountains. But they really didn't want that. Cornering
the market in a doomed industry is nobody's idea of a good time. What
Stephen Poplawski offered them was what they really wanted: a product
that would make them a lot of money and ensure their continuation. But
they didn't recognize it because they didn't understand that what they'd
already seen wasn't what they really wanted.

They concentrated on what has been and what was, the myth of shortage
economies. Had they tried to make some money for themselves rather than
trying to capture the money that was going to others (or had they tried
both) then that company would have done well. As it was, Poplawski ended
up as an engineer at Oster, well after Waring had the market under
pretty good control.

> : They don't know what they need.
> Never?  In all cases?  So only the engineers can tell us what they
> need?

Most people want freedom, compensation, respect, and autonomy. If you
list those out for them. Otherwise, they want safety, simplicity, to be
in comfortable situations where their consequences won't harm them, and
a clear path to follow. Most people want both at the same time and don't
realize that they're contradictory.

Now, when people have settled into comfortable habits with a process or
practice, then they may want to have the same practice or process
automated. These people are frequently successful in getting what they
want, because they want what they already have. Just faster and more
convenient.

What year was it when you realized that you wanted a web browser? By how
many years did it predate the first appearance of the internet? This
shows that new possibilities open up new needs. When something new comes
out, people suddenly have a "need" for it, because they just realized
that it was possible or useful. I use the web like crazy, but didn't
know that I needed it before I had access to it the first time. I just
knew I wanted access to information. Beyond that, it was a set of
engineers somewhere (CERN and UIUC in particular) who showed us what
could be, and then we wanted it.

I've built systems for people who were just starting businesses. They
wanted a single program which was a combination accounting system, game
system, CAD tool, CASE tool, web browser, database, spreadsheet, and
recipe file. In short, they wanted everything they'd ever seen. The
analyst's job in these kinds of systems was to determine (with the
customer) what they really needed and focus them on their real and most
immediate needs. The analyst was a consultant and helped them to plan
processes which would really work, and automation for those processes.
And to convince them that they didn't have to have all of these in a
single program. Having seperate web browser, recipe file, and accounting
system wasn't bad.

Most people want everything they've ever seen. Other people want the
most expensive few things they've already seen. Very few people know
what they want other than selecting from showrooms, catalogs, and
recommendations. Otherwise, people would all design their own clothes,
houses, cars, etc. Fashions in clothing and music would be dead.

> This is a lot like the statement your president RMartin made that "the
>
> engineers should determine the domain model".
>
> I think you are wrong to make such an uqualified assertion.  If you
> said:
> "They _sometimes_ don't know _precisely_ what they need", you would
> be a lot closer to the truth, imo.

I will accept this final answer as being more nearly the problem I had
than the former.  However, as much as I believe in human dignity and as
much as I would like to believe the world a tidy place, I know in my
heart of hearts that this is not true.

In fact, I'm still trying to define what I want in a programming
language, IDE tool, CASE tool, and database. I only know what I've seen
and not what I really want. I'm betting that this is a normal thing,
part of the human condition. How do I decidee? I shop around and look at
different ones. I don't know what I want, but I'll know what's missing
when I see what's available.

Tim

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Mark Wilden]

Ell wrote:
> 
> I am of the mind that we engineers should be finding
> out what it is people want and need.

Hear, bloody hear!

I'd add, however, that we engineers may be able to _implement_ what the
user wants better than the user. In other words, given accurate
knowledge of what their needs and wants are, we can come up with a
solution that satisfies those things which may actually be different
from what the user would suggest. 

But when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter what the user wants or
needs, or whether we take their suggestions or improve on them--all that
counts is making the user _happy_ in the long run, if for no other
reason than that they're the ones who are putting food on our tables.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[W. Wesley Groleau x4923]

> > - Better support for OOP?
> >   Objective-C provided things like save/load for objects.
> Finally, I can have save/load methods in objects if I really wanted 
> to.  What does Objective-C add to ease the burden and support the
> aftermarket? I actually don't know, so this is a chance to explain or
> evangelize.
> 
> Care to comment? I'd love to hear your perspective.

Since I don't know Objective-C, I may not be talking about the 
same thing.  But since you posted to comp.lang.ada....

Ada has 'Read and 'Write functions predefined for everything.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Wes Groleau, Hughes Defense Communications, Fort Wayne, IN USA
Senior Software Engineer - AFATDS                  Tool-smith Wanna-be
                    wwgrol AT pseserv3.fw.hac.com

Don't send advertisements to this domain unless asked!  All disk space
on fw.hac.com hosts belongs to either Hughes Defense Communications or 
the United States government.  Using email to store YOUR advertising 
on them is trespassing!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Ell]

Tim Ottinger (tottinge@dave-world.net) wrote:
: 
: Ell wrote:
: 
: > Tim Ottinger (tottinge@dave-world.net) wrote:
: > :
: > : People don't know what they want.

: > Believe me most people _do_ know what they _want_.
 
: No. Most people see a thing and then decide they want it. 

As an opening comment, the gist of what you and RMartin have to say about
this question is that you the engineers are justified in determining what
users want.  Whereas I am of the mind that we engineers should be finding
out what it is people want and need.

You are seriously delusional if you do not realize that _in general_
people know what they want.  Not that it's always best for them, but
generally they do know what they want/desire.

: > : They don't know what they need.

: > Never?  In all cases?  So only the engineers can tell us what they
: > need?
 
: Most people want freedom, compensation, respect, and autonomy. If you
: list those out for them. Otherwise, they want safety, simplicity, to be
: in comfortable situations where their consequences won't harm them, and
: a clear path to follow. Most people want both at the same time and don't
: realize that they're contradictory.

I think people are smarter than what you and RMartin give them credit for.
It is quite possible and reasonable to want contradictory things in a
certain balance or workable relationship to each other.

The pragmatists deny there is objective truth.  They want to bend things
to what _they_ see, want, or desire.  I say give users what they want!  In
most cases it's possible.

Elliott
-- 
"The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
"We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central: http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Ell]

Mark Wilden (Mark@mWilden.com) wrote:
: 
: Ell wrote:
: > 
: > I am of the mind that we engineers should be finding
: > out what it is people want and need.
 
: Hear, bloody hear!
: 
: I'd add, however, that we engineers may be able to _implement_ what the
: user wants better than the user.

Certainly in general that's true - we have the training and experience
creating software they don't.

: In other words, given accurate
: knowledge of what their needs and wants are, we can come up with a
: solution that satisfies those things which may actually be different
: from what the user would suggest. 

They probably don't even suggest an "implementation".  But what I'm saying
is developers are looney tunes if in general they don't implement the app
*as a closely as possible* to the domain model.  In other words, they
should attempt to preserve as much traceability as possible between
physical implementation and the domain object model.  

The benefit of doing so is increased intuitiveness and understanding for
other initial developers and for enhancement/maintenance developers. 
Those are the major wins and goals of OO modelling - greater intuitiveness
and understandability, both of the domain and the implementation.

Elliott
--
"The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
"We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central: http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Doc]

Ell wrote:
> 
> Tim Ottinger (tottinge@dave-world.net) wrote:
> :
> : People don't know what they want.
> 
> Believe me most people _do_ know what they _want_.
> 
> : They don't know what they need.
> 
<snip>

You don't always get what you want...
but you get what you need.

Cheers
Mick

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Ell]

Ell (ell@access1.digex.net) wrote:
:
: Mark Wilden (Mark@mWilden.com) wrote:
: : 
: : Ell wrote:
: : > 
: : > I am of the mind that we engineers should be finding
: : > out what it is people want and need.
  
: : Hear, bloody hear!
: : 
: : I'd add, however, that we engineers may be able to _implement_ what the
: : user wants better than the user.
 
: Certainly in general that's true - we have the training and experience
: creating software they don't.
 
: : In other words, given accurate
: : knowledge of what their needs and wants are, we can come up with a
: : solution that satisfies those things which may actually be different
: : from what the user would suggest. 
 
: They probably don't even suggest an "implementation".  But what I'm saying
: is developers are looney tunes if in general they don't implement the app
: *as a closely as possible* to the domain model.  In other words, they
: should attempt to preserve as much traceability as possible between
: physical implementation and the domain object model.  
: 
: The benefit of doing so is increased intuitiveness and understanding for
: other initial developers and for enhancement/maintenance developers. 
: Those are the major wins and goals of OO modelling - greater intuitiveness
: and understandability, both of the domain and the implementation.

Other benefits are that when changes occur in the domain, it is easier to
map them to changes in the code, and secondly, code reuse can be more
closely aligned with domain abstractions. 

Elliott
-- 
"The domain object model is the foundation of OOD."
"We should seek out proven optimal practices and use them."
See SW Modeller vs SW Pragmatist Central: http://www.access.digex.net/~ell

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert B. Love]

In <5vnat7$ncf$1@news2.digex.net> Ell wrote:
> You are seriously delusional if you do not realize that _in general_
> people know what they want.  Not that it's always best for them, but
> generally they do know what they want/desire.

And you must not be playing with a full deck if you don't understand
that there is a whole advertising industry that spends several $Billion
to shape what it is people want...and in designer colors too.

Your're correct in the general goal of having engineers respond to
customer needs but lets not believe that the people are all knowing.

----------------------------------------------------------------
 Bob Love                                   MIME & NeXT Mail OK
 rlove@neosoft.com                            PGP key available
----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Joachim Durchholz]

To add my 5c of experience in customer projects:

If you talk to a customer, there are three important pieces of
information to get sorted out:
1) what the customers says that he wants
2) what he wants
3) what he actually needs.
If you get the impression that all three match, you have either an
exceedingly well-informed customer or you didn't understand all aspects
of the situation. (Personally, I always assume the latter, if only to be
on the safe side...)

Regards,
Joachim
-- 
Please don't send unsolicited ads.

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[Robert Dewar]

Joachim says

<<Commercial success and inherent value have no intrinsic connection. The
only connection that exists is that inherent value can help (and often
does help) for commercial success.>>

So how do we judge inherent value? To me commercial success is a surer
judge that some smart engineer who thinks he knows more than everyone else!

Re: The great Java showcase (re: 2nd historic mistake)

[John English]

Mark S. Hathaway (hathawa2@marshall.edu) wrote:
: Could you imagine the angst the powerful people of the "Western world"
: would feel if a movement to overturn our republics in favor of a true
: democratic type of governing were to occur. Their power would be
: threatened and they wouldn't like it.

I remember someone saying (of Chile) that the establishment was
all in favour of democracy until the wrong party won the election...

---------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | fax: (+44) 1273 642405
 University of Brighton    |
---------------------------------------------------------------