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...)