Gosling On Java

Gosling

Through projects such as Groovy, Sun is talking about moving the worlds of Java and scripting languages closer together. But I confess I'm not sure how exactly programming languages are different from scripting languages such as PHP, Perl or Python.
Gosling: Your confusion is well founded. There's an awful lot of loose language. The terms tend to mean different things to different people.

When people talk about scripting languages, they often talk about things that are more toward having a developer be able to slap something together rally quickly and get a demo out the door in minutes. How fast the thing runs or how well the thing scales or how large a system you can build tend to be secondary considerations. In the design of java, we didn't care so much about how quickly you could get the demo out the door, we cared about how quickly we could get a large, scalable system out the door. We ended up making difficult decisions. In general, scripting languages are a lot easier to design than the real programming languages.

The Java design is at two levels: the Java virtual machine and the Java language. All the hard stuff is at the JVM and below. If you can build a scripting language that targets the JVM, you get a certain amount of both properties.

So you're executing script in a JVM?
Gosling: Yeah. All the Java libraries are available to things written in Groovy. And Java applications can use Groovy. They can incorporate Groovy scriptlets.

Page 2 and scripting languages (Score:5, Interesting)
by MarkEst1973 (769601) on Thursday June 30, @09:59PM (#12956728) The entire second page of the article talks about scripting languages, specifically Javascript (in browsers) and Groovy.

1. Kudos to the Groovy [codehaus.org] authors. They've even garnered James Gosling's attention. If you write Java code and consider yourself even a little bit of a forward thinker, look up Groovy. It's a very important JSR (JSR-241 specifically).

2. He talks about Javascript solely from the point of view of the browser. Yes, I agree that Javascript is predominently implemented in a browser, but it's reach can be felt everywhere. Javascript == ActionScript (Flash scripting language). Javascript == CFScript (ColdFusion scripting language). Javascript object notation == Python object notation.

But what about Javascript and Rhino's [mozilla.org] inclusion in Java 6 [sun.com]? I've been using Rhino as a server side language for a while now because Struts is way too verbose for my taste. I just want a thin glue layer between the web interface and my java components. I'm sick and tired of endless xml configuration (that means you, too, EJB!). A Rhino script on the server (with embedded Request, Response, Application, and Session objects) is the perfect glue that does not need xml configuration. (See also Groovy's Groovlets for a thin glue layer).

3. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. Javascript (via Rhino) will be included in Java 6. I also read that Java 6 will allow access to the parse trees created by the javac compiler (same link as Java 6 above).

Java is now Lisp? Paul Graham writes about 9 features [paulgraham.com] that made Lisp unique when it debuted in the 50s. Access to the parse trees is one of the most advanced features of Lisp. He argues that when a language has all 9 features (and Java today is at about #5), you've not created a new language but a dialect of Lisp.

I am a Very Big Fan of dynamic languages that can flex like a pretzel to fit my problem domain. Is Java evolving to be that pretzel?

Scripting language talk... (Score:3, Insightful)
by MrDomino (799876) <mrdomino.gmail@com> on Thursday June 30, @10:19PM (#12956857)

From TFA:

When people talk about scripting languages, they often talk about things that are more toward having a developer be able to slap something together rally quickly and get a demo out the door in minutes. How fast the thing runs or how well the thing scales or how large a system you can build tend to be secondary considerations. ...

This is nit-picking, I know, but I was under the impression that scripting languages were actually defined by the presence of an actively-running interpreter during execution, making it possible to, e.g., construct and execute statements at runtime with things like PHP's exec() or Lua [lua.org]'s do(file|string) functions (see: http://www.lua.org/pil/8.html [lua.org] for discussion on dofile and Lua's status as a scripting language). I wasn't aware that capability for rapid prototyping or language speed had anything to do with it.

Taking that into consideration, then, would Java with JIT [wikipedia.org] qualify as an interpreted or compiled language? I'm not sure, myself---any thoughts?

That aside, a solid interview. Java looks to be pretty interesting; though in its current form it does bug the hell out of me (System.out.println()? Yeah, yeah, OO, but come on, three nested levels of scope just to get to a command line?), its progress has been impressive, and it's an innovative idea.

Java - unfulfilled promisses (Score:2)
by guacamole (24270) on Thursday June 30, @10:50PM (#12957047)

I think the biggest selling point of Java was the cross-platform compatibility. However, 10 years later, I think that it is clear that this promise was largely a fraud. Java was a perhaps a good new platform for writing enterprise applications and applications for certain consumer niches for those developers who didn't want to deal with the unsafe languages like C or C++ or those who were fooled by Sun into believing that Java is the best thing since whatever, but cross-platform compatibility for large applications still remains problematic. For example, most vendors of fairly complex java applications I have seen, not only require you to use a certain version of OS and a web browser (if that's an applet) but also they demand a certain version of the java virtual machine is used and with certain patches on some operating systems. And if you don't meet their requirements, you often run into problems. I bet a python or a perl script would have fared much better in many of those settings as far as portability is concerned.

Language Designers On Java

Gosling