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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Hermann who wrote (28195)	9/21/1999 9:55:00 AM
From: Bearded One	Respond to of 42771

No because there are different requirements for a hand-held programmable calculator than a mainframe. If you limit yourself to one area of hardware, say, PC's, then maybe. And even then, it depends on your definition of what a language is-- for example, what libraries does it include?

To: Mike Hermann who wrote (28195)	9/21/1999 5:44:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello Mike, > Is there any hope for a truly universal programming language that > is platform independent? Isn't that the holy grail? I would speculate yes ... and no. The problems with "universal" anything is that they take a "least-common-demoninator" approach to everything. They do a lot of things well, but specific things somewhat ok. I remember when I learned Pascal and was taught about p-code ... the psuedo-code that was going to allow Pascal to be completely portable. But it never quite worked out. This is due to a similar reason that Java continues to have problems. Java is a great idea, but due to the design so far, it only has limited purposes and is painfully slow. One of the big controversies about Java was the use of "Native Interfaces" ... these were the interfaces that would allow you to exploit the capabilites of the OS that you are running on. But if you use them, then you eliminate the portability of your application. Until the Java classes exist that provide access to the breadth of OS functionality available on all the platforms, it will continue to have limited purposes. Also, it's not so good to write everything in a high-level language ... for example can you imagine the state of the Internet if the software inside of Cisco routers was written in Java or Visual Basic? Although these high-level languages have other benefits, speed and size are not two of them. This is another reason why Novell does so well as a special purpose platform for services like caching. Just like Cisco develops specialized code to run their routers, NetWare is a super optimized I/O engine ... designed to "pump" data from the LAN/WAN to Disk and back. But all of this is written as kernel extensions and compiled and linked as a NetWare Loadable Module ... optimized for NetWare, but not exactly cross-platform. I always like to say that I believe we'll have the one solution as soon as the world speaks the same English language all the time! ;-) Scott C. Lemon