Re: "Obviously, You Will Need a Java Course..."

[merlyn]

Not to fan the fires too much, but it's too bad people are touting Java as "Object Oriented", when in fact it's only a hybrid-OO language like Perl or C++. Most people will never see the elegance of pure objects in Smalltalk, Self, or Eiffel (or Ruby perhaps), and may never quite get what OO is really all about.

In any event, I hope Java replaces C++ entirely. We've had that abomination for far too long. But Java won't replace Perl, any more than Perl replaces C++.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[turnstep]

Just curious: what makes Java only "hybrid-OO"? I haven't dabbled with Java for many, many years*, so I don't recall too much about it...

*I was excited when I first heard about Java, and searched hard before I found what was apparently the /only/ book on the market about it, that was heavy on the buzzwords and light on the examples. Kind of lost interest after that. Now there's whole sections in bookstores devoted to it. Must have been a sign to focus on Perl. :)

[merlyn]

Java has "primitive types" that cannot be subclassed nor extended.

Smalltalk has no such artificial distinction.

Java proponents claim that you must have primitive types to get decent performance. Odd, because Sun's Java VM itself is primarily written in Self, which has no primitive types (in fact, it doesn't even have classes!).

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[IlyaM]

You have triggered my curiousity with statement that Java was written in Self. I've tried to find anything about it but I could not (I tried several different queries on google but 'self' and 'java' attracts too much irrelevant web sites). Can you point me to the source of this information?