Learning OOP...

[Alex Martelli]

"Mike" <mrm677 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f25b4a41.0106121309.126d753f at posting.google.com...
    ...
> The Java Virtual Machine is just not efficient and is not integrated
> well enough into operating systems such as Windows.  How many
> applications, besides Java IDE's, are actually in widespread use?  I

No idea in general, but a couple of things... the best bridge-playing
program you can buy (www.gib.com) uses Java for all of its GUI and
file-handling (the actual core program that chooses bids and plays
is a separate C-coded executable).  It's available for Windows and
Linux, which may explain the choice of Java for the front-end (though
Python with wxWindows would also be a natural!-).  But clearly, in
the mind of GIB's father, "the play's the thing" -- he freely gives
away improved versions of the front-end, "bridge improvements"
in the back-end is the only thing he charges for (he's also a leading
researcher in bridge-play algorithms and he codes the back-end
personally, while the front-end he had coded by another guy).

On the other hand, one of our competitors (in the PDM field -- that's
Product-Data Management) recently made a big fuss about their
latest, huge improvement to their program -- apparently, they threw
away their whole Java implementation and recoded the whole thing
in C++.  They can't stop vaunting how much faster and memory-
leaner it's become:-).  [considering that many of their competitors,
us included, never left C++ as the main implementation language,
I wonder how good a marketing differentiator it is for them to have
come _back_ to C++ after a long Java excursion, but...:-)]


Alex