Out of Ammo

March 12, 2006 20:31:00.738

Gosling's outburst is continuing to demonstrate an "out of ammunition" posture at Sun. I spotted this retort to Gosling tonight:

Here’s a good measure of performance. A certain sorting algorithm that determines the most active conversations. 100ms in Java, but a painfully slow 500ms in Ruby (5x). Once you add database query and networking, the difference between the languages is about 10%. 10% is not a big difference.

About the size of it. Compared to dynamic languages, Java is a huge pile of premature optimization.

Comments

Java just serves up web pages

[Charlie Bogues] March 12, 2006 23:04:21.483

Ooops,

Ten years later Java has APIs for just about everything, but still mostly used for serving Web pages.

I guess I wasn't the only one that found his "Ruby and PHP are only for serving up web pages" ironic. Looks like someone at Sun had to point that out to him, or maybe he started to think about the situation a little bit more.

Uh...no

[asj] March 15, 2006 20:58:16.089

" Ten years later Java has APIs for just about everything, but still mostly used for serving Web pages."

Actually, that's not true. Java actually is most used in the burgeoning small devices arena. It powers most of the apps in mobile devices, runs about half of all smart cards (including the national health cards of several countries) and most of the SIM cards in the entire world's cellphones.

Compared to the numbers in small devices, the server apps in Java pale in comparison.