Newsgroups: comp.lang.java,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: johnk@spasm.niddk.nih.gov (John Kuszewski)
Subject: Re: Will Java kill C++?
Message-ID: <1996Apr12.000409.29727@alw.nih.gov>
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References: <31682FFE.2781E494@bbn.com> <DpJyGG.FKK@hkuxb.hku.hk> <denatale-1004960822260001@grail1506.nando.net> <dbell-1104960125190001@wholder2.cts.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 00:04:09 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.java:39421 comp.lang.c++:184131 comp.lang.smalltalk:37139

In article <dbell-1104960125190001@wholder2.cts.com>, dbell@shvn.com (Doug Bell) writes:
|> What are those circles which you care about?  Probably the one's who's
|> members who spend 'countless hours' theorizing about why all those
|> programmers using sticks and rocks (e.g. assembly, C, C++, insert any
|> widely adopted language here), rather than those using the elegant and
|> refined tools of the sophisticates (e.g. Smalltalk, Lisp, Prolog, insert
|> any language rarely used for commercial applications here) ARE PRODUCING
|> ALL THE PRODUCTS!
|> 

You're displaying your ignorance here.  The vast majority (~70%)
of the money spent on software in America is not spent on 
mass-market apps, but on custom software for individual companies.  
That C is used to write Microsoft Word is therefore hardly indicative
that "all the products" are written in C.  

Take a look at the largest software systems in existence--airline 
reservation systems, the Social Security administration's databases,
the US military's systems.  None of those are written in C, and for
good reason.  C is a terrible language to use on very big projects.
They're written in COBOL and Ada, which scale much better than C.

In fact, C is a terrible language for anything but assembly language
type jobs.  If you need to write a word processor that'll run on every
idiot's 386 in 2MB RAM, then of course you write it in C.  If you have
a really big, or really important, or really long-term project, you
write it in tools that are more appropriate than C.  

Smalltalk is extremely widely used in certain markets.  Those markets
that use it need the ability to make major changes in large apps
*extremely quickly*.  Markets that use Smalltalk are less sensitive
to hardware requirements.  The best example of a market that uses
Smalltalk in preference to C is in investment banking, where improved
financial analysis codes can translate directly into large competitive
advantages.  If you and I owned investment banks, and you relied on
C programmers to make changes to your analysis and market-prediction
code, then my Smalltalk programmers would put you out of business
in short order.

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John Kuszewski                     ||  |/  /|  ||      
johnk@spasm.niddk.nih.gov          ||  /  /||  ||
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that's MISTER protein G to you!     |/__/|      |
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"Biophysics has driven me to an attitude of apocalyptic doom"
   --Frank Delaglio
