Les Mikesell wrote:
> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">On
> 12/21/2010 1:06 PM, Sean wrote:
>>
>>> If you can treat something as a black box and trust it, the size of
>>> the component isn't that important.
>> "If" or "IFF" ..(IF AND ONLY IF)..? A deep scepticism forces me to
>> treat all boxes as grey no matter how long since last visited...
>> (including my own, which are a sort of dark grey!?).
>
> Yes, especially my own. That's the value of using components that are
> maintained by others and widely used. The code gets much better QA
> than I could ever do myself and all you have to do is peek at the mail
> list once in a while to know if previously-working interfaces are
> going to be broken if you update. For things from the base CentOS
> package repositories and to a slightly lesser extent EPEL, you can
> assume someone else has already made sure that the updates aren't
> behavior-changing and required dependencies are met.
>
> Java stuff seems to be more self-contained so there is a little more
> freedom to mix component versions between applications and you aren't
> completely tied to someone else's update schedule.
>
Yes, superior exploitation must be granted Java (over say Cpan,
C-libraries etc) in scenarios that are naturally exploitation-heavy,
such as you indicate. But for everything? Hmmm.
A long ago tale goes thus: There was once a problem I would have
attacked with half a page of Prolog had I known I would end up writing
all the code myself, no matter how hard to actually get it right. I
conceded to Java for the sake of team effort and wrote my portion as far
as I could, but was unable to test properly without the other 3 portions
which, as it turned out, never eventuated. Towards the death knell I
stayed up and wrote them myself, chapter after chapter .. on .. and on
.. and on. It ran, but no surprise it produced incorrect results, and
too much code to go back through and try fix all that spaghetti logic in
the time available. A lesson learnt, and I haven't written a line of
Java since!
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