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To: Charles Hughes who wrote (9665)	3/31/1998 8:10:00 AM
From: i-node	Respond to of 10836

I would be amazed to see progress in languages come to a halt because of Java. Exactly. New languages have been coming since the inception of computing, and I see nothing to indicate Java is going to stop it...

To: Charles Hughes who wrote (9665)	3/31/1998 9:28:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10836

Java has made it easy to put a new language front end on the JVM. Which is precisely what I've been telling those who claim Java is just a language. Well, there are already several language running within the Java environment and they are written in Java. I don't believe that new languages always offer a huge increment of improvement over the languages they replace. Given the penetration of Wintel I see WORA as having reduced importance for developers living in a Windows world as 90% or more necessarily must. Java is a radical departure from C++; I disagree that it's an incremental improvement unless you consider SmallTalk incremental in comparison to C++. Others are not happy with the fact that Java used the gnarly 'C' syntax. Well, one of the reasons C was so popular was orthogonality of the syntax and the economy of expression and I think C++ extents that well. I think C is generally regarded as elegant by those who use it day in and day out. That doesn't mean Pascal or BASIC programmers are going to like it but I don't recall anybody asking for their opinion [note to self: nice flame, a real beauty]. Seriously though, BEGIN and END have to take the cake for wasted effort and ugly syntax and frankly, it's meaningless if you don't speak English. For another group of customers who were displeased by 'missing' OO elements of Java, like multiple inheritance... Well, that could be a future enhancement but as you know there are patterns which could be leveraged in the core packages today had MI been available. Still, I can live without that but they need some template-like functionality, for building containers at least. One ACM survey some years ago noted that at least 10,000 computer languages had been invented by that time. I bet there are a hundred designers with gleams in their eyes that are working on the 'next java' right now. And I don't mean those clowns at the DCOM factory. What's important is the ability to leverage your current investment and given the entrenched nature of C, C++ was a logical next step. Java extends C++ (puns incidental) and perhaps most importantly it leverages the skill sets of C++ developers. I think they probably counted Sed, Awk and Perl in that language survey. What were are really talking about is languages which define a basis or a space upon which higher level languages may grafted onto and there are scant few of those. Java is already in that elite group.