Ugh. I probably shouldn't be writing this, but what the
hell. Being tired and having missed about 18 hours of sleep
during the last 7 days gives a good excuse to rant
mindlessly.
So, it's been precisely one month since my last diary
entry. Whee. Nothing much has happened at work, but still
I'm feeling overworked, underpaid and severely
irritated.
omniORB3 looks pretty good. Shame that there aren't any
debian packages available that I know of. The Python binding
for omniORB also looks pretty damn convincing; at least for
purposes of rapid prototyping. I've had some misgivings
about the python interpreter's habit of keeping reference
counts of python objects (thinking that it'd be slower than
the mark-and-sweep GC commonly used in JVMs), but after
running some tests using a CORBA object factory server
written in python I can say that no, python doesn't seem to
leak memory provided you do things the proper way (i.e.
paranoid del's in the main program and such). Besides, it
seems that a group of, say, 10 python statements would do a
lot more than 10 statements of Java, let alone C++.
I still don't understand why it was so important to have
strong typing in Java. Since most JVMs do a good bit of
checking and validation and other things to java bytecode
before execution, I wouldn't imagine that it'd be a big
problem to do some crude type resolution in the bytecode
validator. To me it looks like Java combines the
disadvantages of both strong typing (which tend to make the
average non-trivial line of code longer than 80 columns
[casting, methodsThatAreWrittenLikeThis, ...]) and a
bytecode compilation pass (loss of meaningful source code as
well as the information contained therein that would give a
smart JIT compiler an edge).
Looks like this diary entry became a rant about my pet
peeves regarding Java. Oh well. Time to catch some shut-eye.
(also, it looks like I kept the promise I made earlier on,
the one about ranting without focus...)