Re: Y Store now C++

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

> Java was hardly the only language to provide important benefits over C/C++,
such as..

>Java was hardly the only language to provide important benefits over C/C++,
>but the reason that it reached such a wide level of acceptance is because it
>reached a wide level of acceptance, and the reason for THAT is that it 
>managed to ride on the WWW/Netscape wave, for which it was not
>originally intended. 

I'm curious to know if there were any other contenders at that
time.. esp. ones that took care of platform / integration issues
seriously. (not Perl's promise of.. oh we'll get to DBI/DBD eventually
-- they did get there, but .. :)
 
People need to make cashflow and payroll this month! What other
languages were true contenders circa that time frame? (Remember: we
already had/have production apps in Lisp -- so I'm looking for what
were "new" solutions at that point in time frame that I might have
missed :)

BTW, I just don't buy the "Java ran/rode with the WWW/Netscape
coat-tail" argument at all -- this is one of those "press generated
marketing half-truths". Coat-tails have a way of disappearing, and
languages do fall out of favor.. remember AI and Lisp? One could argue
that the fact that this hasn't happened yet, implies there was not
much of a coat-tail effect to begin with. If all you are saying is
that Netscape marketing $$ helped Java -- I could agree -- a little
bit. After all, there was confusion about Javascript vs. Java. But the
more important reason I believe this has not happened is that I have
talked to lots of early Java adopters (I wrote "Onto Java", an
introductory Java text book w/ Patrick Winston round about the same
time, and got lots of feedback -- from all over the world -- people
that were downloading the SDK and cracking open the book :). Let me
tell you - my empirical evidence proves otherwise -- because one
question I asked most people was "why are you learning this
language?". I know there's a strong tendency here to believe in
reality distortions, but .. :)

Sure, programmers are sometimes (mis)led this way or that by hype
etc., but Dan -- you say PSE Pro (or was it the later Excelon XML
stuff) was written in Java -- why did your company make that decision?
Because of the hype wrt. applets/www/netscape?