From: Conrad Schneiker <schneik@...>
Date: 2000-07-06T22:57:57-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:03891] Re: JRuby?

Hi

Charles Hixson wrote:

> "Conrad Schneiker" wrote:
> >
> > ...
> > That's only a good reason if you really need something like that. As Perl
> > has shown, there is an enormous amount of work out there that doesn't (not
> > to mention an enormous amount of work that would be better done in Ruby :-)
> >
> > But if you think you really need it, the first question should be, what do
> > you want to accomplish?
> > ...
> >
> A fair question.  Java has portable gui's.  Not perfect, but pretty
> good.  Java is embeddable in web pages for "safely" ??downloading.  Java
> has support for threading (ok, that's probably a pretty temporary
> advantage).  Anything else?

Well, I'm sure Java has all sorts of other goodies people would like to use.
There is one big gotcha (not counting the underlying implementation and
reliability problems of a JRuby): you often have to learn enough about Java and
spend enough time thinking like Java (especially when it comes to debugging) that
you might as well do the stuff in Java in the first place.

There are quite a few xxxx languages with Jxxxx systems, but AFAIK, non of them
has flourished, even though JPython and JTcl seem to be working tolerably well.
Other approaches like JPL (Java Perl Lingo) seem to be floundering forward at a
snail's pace. Hopefully programming language interfaces that make use of Java's
variously newer, intended, and higher-level interoperability capabilities will
fare better.

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)