[Freedombox-discuss] report on activities in Banja Luka

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On 11-08-11 at 06:18am, J David Eisenberg wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 1:59 AM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> > On 11-08-10 at 06:33am, J David Eisenberg wrote:
> >> Purely out of curiosity, would you prefer Scala to Java? Same JVM, 
> >> but a more "modern" language.

[snip]

> I was really just curious to know if your dislike was for Java as a 
> language or the JVM as a platform.

Sorry for distorting your question.

I have no experience with Scala, so really cannot compare.

My (limited) experiences with Java have shown it as consuming lots of 
memory and running less reliable (i.e. crashing rather than just running 
slower) when following documentation and attempting to limit memory use.

Also, my feel of the upstream Java community is that code sharing is 
more often done by forking code than maintaining ABIs of shared 
libraries.  In my understanding use of shared libraries not only improve 
the ability of detecting and fixing bugs (which is the main reason for 
Debian to push hard to reuse as much as possible) but also may save 
memory when multiple projects are running concurrently.

My knowledge of Java may be wrong, and my judgement on the community or 
technical understanding of shared library benefits may be flawed.  
Nevertheless I have in the past been discoured from using Java so that 
today I am not knowledgeable in playing with it or packaging it.

So even if my arguments for avoiding Java is wrong, correcting my 
knowledge won't change my choices: I am *today* not as comfortable 
packaging or testing Java code as I am with code written in Perl, C, 
C++, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Node or Lua.


> > Looking forward to your concrete contributions too!
> 
> I'm more of a documentation kind of guy, so that's probably where 
> you'll see me doing stuff.

Great!  I recognize being lousy at that myself, so really excited that 
some care explicitly for that area!


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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