[gameprogrammer] Re: Carmack on Java phone games

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 08:58 +1200, Jake Briggs wrote:
> >Marketing was there. He asked, "So... what you are saying is that with
> >this language you can write code that will run anywhere?" and Gosling
> >said something like "Well, yeah... theoretically...". And the rest is a
> >marketing blunder like the world hasn't seen for a very long time.
> >
> >             Bob Pendleton
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> I have only been software engineering for 2 years (after varsity) so my 
> opinions are, of course, based on limited experiance. However, the 
> company I work for produces an app, with java 1.3 and sisc. It makes 
> heavy use of xsl to produce html, scheme, sql etc.... Anyway, to the 
> point. We have targetted the engine at IBM's JVM, version 1.3, on 
> solaris (thats what our biggest client uses). We have never had any 
> trouble running the same engine on various other JVM's from Sun and IBM, 
> on both x86 and whatever Suns solaris runs on, on both windows and 
> various Linux's. Well there was one problem with IBM's JVM where a class 
> had a public variable, which on Sun's JVM was private. It seems to me 
> that java bytecode is pretty damn portable, between major JVM's and 
> popular operating systems on normal hardware. 

Yep, it is. 


> I see what your saying 
> though, this app could never run on a mobile phone :)

And that is exactly my point. :-) The Java marketeers said "write once,
run anywhere". And, they came out with examples that included running
Java on an embedded processor built into a gold (tone) ring. And
everybody who knows what "everywhere" really means got up and left the
table.

Too bad Sun didn't come out and say "Write once, run on any major JVM on
any OS as long as it is Windows or UNIX compatible and the hardware has
at least 64 MB of RAM and a 100 MHz processor". But, that just isn't as
good a marketing slogan as "Write once, run anywhere". To bad. I really
like Java, but that one marketing error has hurt the language more than
anything else I can think of.

                Bob Pendleton

> 
> Jake
> 
> 



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