Metis

[Luke-Jr]

On Sunday 25 February 2007 02:40:08 pm Jared wrote:
> The whole virtual machine concept implies that you are not
> to be trusted as a developer. You are expected to trust
> the language vendor more than your own programming skills.

This isn't the concept of the virtual machine. After all, it's really just a 
extremely CISC CPU intended to be emulated. It's not part of the language.

> Java has cross-platform merits, but clearly, it was designed by the
> marketing department, not by the geek squad.

Java has cross-platform merits not because of the virtual machine, but because 
of its extensive standard library giving abstractions for most of what people 
need to do. C and C++ can be generally cross-platform, provided you only use 
the standard library, but their stdlibs don't cover as much ground. Qt, on 
the other hand, builds on C++ and replaces its standard library with one that 
is more flexible and has a broader range of support, including the QtGui 
module which provides for graphical interfaces.

> If you can't crash a server, and crash it big with buggy inline assembler,
> how are you ever going to learn grace under pressure, which is a necessary
> component of any responsible world domination plan? ;)

You can't, or at least shouldn't be able to, crash a server with mere userland 
code. In most cases, you can't provided the server has been setup properly 
(eg, limiting forks to prevent forkbombs).