High-level languages, large projects, GNOME and the .NET controversy

[Paul Rubin]

paul at boddie.net (Paul Boddie) writes:
> It occurs to me that there are still many people who choose not to use
> languages of a higher level than C/C++ for development, and it would
> be interesting to know what their reasons are. Of course, writing a
> graphical toolkit *purely* in Python is somewhat ambitious, and there
> are clearly performance issues to be considered, but I still can't
> understand why people would want to write *entire* applications (of
> the nature discussed above) in C/C++ these days.
> 
> Can anyone enlighten me? Perhaps I should have cross-posted to
> comp.lang.c, or whatever. :-)

I worked on one pretty big Java system and although the development
process was much easier than C++ (actually I'd say the coding effort
was comparable, but the debugging effort was greatly reduced), the
resulting Java programs were performance dogs.  That was ok for the
stuff I was doing--it was a high end application and when the programs
ran too slow, we just bought more expensive Sun hardware.  If the
programs had to run on millions of people's low-cost home PC's, I'm
not sure we could have gotten away with using Java.