Re: Netscape Licenses Java
Gavin Nicol ([email protected])
Wed, 24 May 1995 22:14:32 -0400
>support for Win NT and Win 95, with MacOS next week. With Netscape
>licensing it, and committing to port it to other OS's, it seems that
>Java may just "make it."
Don't be too hasty. Java is important, but it is also not
perfect. The language is class-oriented to the extreme (there is
nothing else) and it cetrainly does not encourage exploratory
programming. You cannot easily generate code at runtime, which is a
very nice feature to have in certain cases. Remote method invocation
is given the back seat (though you could implement it in Java), and I
think there are many cases where that is the optimal IPC for
distributed object systems. It is very difficult to protect one's
intellectual property in Java: decompilers seem quite feasible due to
the design of the Java instruction set (witness guile), and the only
other way is to write native code, which puts us back to square one
basically (platform dependence).
As for Netscapes' long-term success...