[Gllug] More Microsoft patents

[chris.wareham at btopenworld.com]

Pete Ryland <pdr at pdr.cx> wrote:
> 
> C is by no means obsolete.  I am lucky in that I have managed finally to
> find somewhere that pays me to code C.
> 

C certainly isn't obsolete, but that is one of the many snide remarks I hear
whenever I point out that it's my key skill. I can code in C   (and Objective
C which is going through a bit of a renaissance thanks to MacOS X), but I stick
with C unless there's a very good argument for an OO approach. As others have
pointed out, gibberish can be produced in any language. The difference with C
is that the language has a small enough feature set that you can normally work
out what the gibberish does.

> Java is nice to code in, but after three years doing it professionally, I
> got sick of people being dissappointed with the results, even if it was 1.
> out of my hands that it was "slow", and 2. requested to be done in Java by
> them in the first place, despite warnings.
> 

A good way of avoiding the criticism that Java's slow is to code the backend
in C or C  . Then use CORBA as a glue to a Java frontend. This is exactly the
approach we're taking at my current employers. The backend consists of a
server process which starts up and looks for shared objects, each of which
contains an implementation of a CORBA object. The Java portion is a bunch of
dialogs which are dynamically loaded from menus in a toplevel dialog.
Performance is not an issue (we have a mix of PC's, diskless terminals running
VNC and handhelds) and development time for each screen is very short.

Chris


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