Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 03:30:00 -0500 (EST) From: PVHP@LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU Subject: Re: my perl-penguin rant To: jake@cyborganic.net Cc: libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu, ptk@guest.WPI.EDU
Jake Kauth writes on 4-APR-1996 02:55:22.83:
re: penguin is "more or less secure": the same can be said for java. admittedly, i don't know enough about security to say that java is or isn't secure. but java certainly hasn't been around long enough and wrung out by a large programmer/user community, that it should be called secure. maybe in theory, but it hasn't withstood the acid test of long-term, heavy use.
trust goes hand-in-hand with security, and i don't trust java or the monolithic mentality that has come with it. the most popular application that supports java is Netscape, and i don't like Netscape on principle. they are trying to "pull a microsoft" and become a giant (which is admittedly good business) but i don't trust 'em one bit. java is being shoved down everybody's throats.
This is a common confusion: Java is a compiled language that you get from Sun & Run on only those platforms that Sun has bothered to put a compiler kit together for (currently I know the list includes Suns and OS/2 - the last time I checked the list did not include OSF/1 or AIX or Ultrix or ...)
JavaScript is a "web programming language" that is currently only distributed with Netscape 2.0 and higher versions (like 2.01 which was recently released to add the "disable java" button - security :-). Java and JavaScript are not the same. Indeed one of the "selling points" of JavaScript (apparently over Java) is that it does not have overloaded operators! Yep you have to write loops over all your arrays - even just to initialize them! (Ya might as well be programming in Fortran 4)
There was promise of a Netscape for VMS to be released in early 96 (never materialized - please correct me if I am wrong :-)
re: not multi-threaded: nope. perl doesn't have "threads" per se, but it is an extensible language and fork() works, so there's no reason a "thread class" couldn't be written that does what java does.
There is work proceeding on perl threads
re: perl/penguin not cross platform, hardware independent: perl currently runs on DOS, Windows, 95, NT, Unix, Mac, Amiga... it's a long list.
VMS (Ahem ;-)
there is also the perl-Tk interface for GUI development. (i only know of perl-TK for Unix machines, but tcl-Tk is available for Mac and Windoze/95/NT, so it is a conceivable that the ports could be done creating a standard platform-independent GUI API)
tkweb (Tk-b10++) is up & running - it is already a perl based graphical web-browser (and pretty cute too :-)
java as a language was created in a closed environment in a lab somewhere, springing full-grown from the forehead of the sun folks.
My understanding was that java was developed to run micro-controllers on coffee machines (hence the name).
Peter Prymmer
pvhp@lns62.lns.cornell.edu