Java Vs. Other Languages

[Salchester]

Evening Everyone, (Well it is here )

How does Java differ from other programming languages, and what are the advantages/disadvantages of using one language over another?

Many Thanks,

[Belisarius]

Well, most languages have certain advantages over other languages that people use in certain cases. For instance, I'd use PHP for web development as opposed to C. On the other hand, I'd rather use C++ than Perl to create a graphical application

Java is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. It can do pretty much anything, but not necessarily as well as a language that has been designed to do it well.

[teknomage1]

Right, like what Belisarius said, java is a general purpose language that has it's own virtual machine. It's around the same detail level as C++ in terms of what you have to tell the compiler, but java has garbage collection so you don't have to explicitly manage memory for your objects. Java is object oriented and supports classes and inheritance. Java is generally worse than C/C++ for heavily I/O based OS level tasks such as recursively crawling through a file system. But in exchange for the elimination of pointer errors, this may or may not be a deal breaker, depending on your problem.

The second part of your question is somewhat useless in the abstract but is much easier to answer given a specific problem domain. For example, nothing beats Perl for text processing. Also, Forth is the king of minimalist stack based programming, but I certainly wouldn't want to write a web browser in Forth.

[toe_cutter]

Originally Posted by teknomage1

For example, nothing beats Perl for text processing.

Oh? I'd put my Python against your Perl any day. That sounds kind of sick now that I think about it.

[teknomage1]

I give Perl the edge in the text arena because regular expressions are completely integrated into the language, so a user doesn't have instantiate a regex opbject, and scan for matches, and extract the matches manually. Also perl's quoting is more flexible than python's, letting you do fancier escapes.

Mantainence is, of course, something else entirely.

[toe_cutter]

Originally Posted by teknomage1

Mantainence is, of course, something else entirely.

hahaha..Perl does have the edge in Obfuscated coding.

[Rasheed]

And if you want to write applications for a cellphone, I guess Java is your best option.