Re: Java

[Dan Weinreb <address@hidden>]

   Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 10:41:26 -0800 (PST)
   From: Morgan McGuire <morgan3d@yahoo.com>

   All of this is the case.  For a commercial product, getting Java
   installed and operating properly on the user's machine is a nightmare. 

Gee, our customers using our Java-based products don't report any
problems.  And I have installed many Java-based products and it all
just works.  I don't necessarily think we should get into a whole
debate about this on this list, but I just want the other people on
the list to know that there is disagreement on this point.

					       but as soon as you split
   into subdirectories or have more than a few files, you'll want to be
   able to build in a more sophisticated fashion.  

When I worked in Lisp, exactly the same thing was true.

						   javac's dependency
   checker is known to be broken-- it fails to be properly conservative. 

That's true, although I'm not sure to what extent a bug in javac
should be considered as a major factor in deciding whether a langauge
is "lightweight" or not.  But I still think something like make, or
defsystem, or "projects" ends up being the right way to go as soon as
something starts getting into multiple subdirectories or more than a
few files, anyway.