Re: Y Store /Closures

[Russ Ross <address@hidden>]

> Avi: You've gone from "cannot be done" to "cannot be done in as many
> lines of code". I won't take that bait, Sorry. Because the lines of
> code you are focussed on reducing is not what I (and other enterprise
> developers are focused on -- supporting the back button in the manner
> you describe is less than 5% of my use-cases). Thanks. I'll conclude
> that thus far you seem to agree that in principle you can do w/out
> continuations, but perhaps *you* think that in languages w/out such
> support it might be verbose to implement "some" such traversals.
> Would that be a fair characterization?

This sounds a little like arguing that Visual Basic is a good
language for implementing web browsers.  After all, you can just
embed IE as a COM object which is much simpler than writing Mozilla
or Konqueror.

There's a big difference between having a language that is suitable
for a task and having a library that is written specifically for
that task.  Struts and other J2EE tools are written specifically for
web application development.  That doesn't mean the features of the
Java language are well suited to solving these problems, it means
lots of other people have already solved most of them, usually with
heavyweight frameworks that dictate quite a bit of your application
structure.  Having a well thought out library made for your specific
problem domain is almost always going to be as good or better than
having a language that is appropriate for the domain.

It has been said before that the availability of many of these tools
is the most compelling argument in favor of Java, not the language
itself.  If we are discussing language features and their
suitability for certain tasks, saying that the task has already been
solved so that language must be as good as any other is a pretty
unconvincing argument.

Regards,

Russ


p.s. I don't think this went through the first time; if it is a
duplicate please accept my apology.