Scott Yang's Playground

Via Reddit, Who Killed the Software Engineer? “One of the most ill-considered steps that universities took was to adopt Java as the most widely used language in introductory programming courses…” Why are the universities replacing Miranda/Haskell/Modula-2 with Java/C#? Because that’s what the IT industry uses, but not necessarily because they are good languages to learn [...]

Java has been released by Sun as free software, licensed under GNU GPLv2. I’ll vote this as the coolest event this year, for software developers at least. Java creator James Gosling’s letter here. Sun is really re-positioning themselves in relation with the open source communities, and how much has changed over the last 10 years! [...]

Tim Bray: Java is free, or soon to be free, with Jon Schwartz and Rich Green announcing it in a few hours. It will be released under GPLv2, with SE and ME now and EE in a few months time. Way to go Sun, and once it is open sourced, it’s never too little too [...]

vNES, a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator implemented in Java, where you can play all these old NES games online right inside your browser, in all its 8-bit glory. Mario Brothers, Bubble Bubble, etc. Doesn’t work with Java 1.4.2 for me but Java 1.5 is fine. There are heaps of old-school games that brought back [...]

Google has just released their Google Web Toolkit, a development library/toolkit for web applications which supposedly powers Google lines of products. It is still in beta, but available for download. It runs on both Windows and Linux. First of all, it is very different from Yahoo’s User Interface Library. Not just the look and feel — [...]

James Gosling in Java Is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby or C#: “PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he [Gosling] continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have [...]

Via ZDNet News, Marc Andreessen of former Netscape endorse PHP over Java for website development, because it is open source, having easier environment, widely used and have big companies behind it. Interesting description about Java: Java is much more programmer-friendly than C or C++, or was for a few years there until they made just as complicated. [...]