On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 03:40:00PM +0200, Platonides wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth:
Because the problem is *not* "shouldn't some things which are now written in Java be written in JS, etc, instead?", it's "There are indisputably useful things which can *only* be written in Java for the deployment environment being discussed", and he didn't solve that worth a damn, alas.
I wasn't trying to prove it. It should be addressed by Andreas, who wants them. I pointed the example didn't need Java at all, but Rob opined it was a trivial implementation (Andreas probably disagreed). I agree it doesn't probe, but i'm not pushing for java :-) They do exist, can some of them be needed on a wmf project? Don't know. Show me one to decide ;-) Or maybe it could be done in both but it's coded 200% faster in java, who knows...
I understand that you were not trying to prove Java was necessary -- indeed, that you *were* trying to prove that Java is rarely necessary (or something close to that).
My point was merely that in the current context (figuring out how to *provide* Java support), the only meta-argument that's useful on the topic of "necessity" is "it's provably never necessary". Since you can't make that argument with a straight face -- clearly, there will be some things that Java can do that JS can't -- then arguments on that axis aren't useful to "how can we do it"... which was the question at hand.
Therefore, such arguments merely clutter the discussion space.
Cheers, -- jra