From: James Higgins (jameshiggins@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Apr 16 2001 - 07:39:37 MDT
At 12:12 PM 4/15/2001 -0400, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>Ben Goertzel wrote:
> >
> > In sum, I'd highly recommend Java for small-scale engineering projects.
> > It's a fun language to work with. But for large-scale projects (meaning,
> > systems that will use a lot of memory and a lot of threads), my advice
> is to
> > stick with C/C++. Java is just not tuned for such projects, and you run
> > into a hell of a lot of annoying problems that waste a huge amount of time
> > and effort, far outweighing the savings in programming time.
>
>Now *that's* a new opinion.
>
>What do you think about prototyping? C++ doesn't seem like a good
>language for that - I was thinking Python, actually.
If you want something that is somewhere between Java & C/C++ I'd suggest
Delphi or Kylix. Borland's Object Pascal is very clean so you get a lot of
the same advantages as using Java from a programming
standpoint. Development is very quick compared to C/C++, incredibly so for
user interfaces, which you probably won't need much of. Due to the way BOP
handles memory, you don't end up with anywhere near the bugs you do in
C. On the other hand Delphi/Kylix use the same optimized compiler backend
as Borland's C compilers so you get excellent speed. As for 3rd party
software there are quite a lot of 3rd party native Delphi libraries
available. You can also use any tool kit written for Visual Basic (with
some performance penalty since they use ActiveX). Many C/C++ libraries are
also useable if they provide DLLs.
The only problem with using Borland's Object Pascal language is
portability. Although this is thankfully getting much much better. Delphi
runs on Windows and now Kylix runs on Linux. New source code written in
Delphi 6 is in the area of 99.9% compatible with Kylix. The idea is that
you can have a single source code base that supports both platforms,
including GUI code. And it works great if you use their compatibility set
of visual components (CLX). But any code written that the programmer
doesn't specifically tie to Windows libraries is compatible, so this is far
more compatible than even C++ across Windows & Linux. Plus it looks like
Borland is now considering support for additional operating systems!
Anyway, just my 2 cents worth.
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