Re: Games in Java?

[Bert Peers <rat@larian.com>]

Erik wrote:

> c++ is almost 20 years, C is a little over 30, those are the two common ones.
> and java is from '91 I think :) The thing I think really turns a language from a
> neat toy to a standard language is adoption by the universities, which is just
> starting now for java. 

euh.... lol ?

Universities have been adapting all sorts of funky stuff,
like Scheme, LISP, Pascal, Smalltalk, etc because they are
considered "educationally ok" or whatever.  Ok, your
statement holds true in that there are indeed some
projects which are using those languages simply because
the authors of the software were probably exposed to them
at the university (like Gimp's plugin, or the game logic
module of Abuse).. Other than that, I don't see much
relation between industry practice and university standards.
To stay on topic, I think that especially for games it's all
about performance and available APIs, regardless of what
the universiteits teach.  For instance, a lot of universities
are also pretty enthusiast about Ada95, and it is perfectly
suited for highperformance, multithreaded big-LOK count
projects that games are.  There are no APIs though
(except maybe a hacked-after-work OpenGL binding or
something).  So I came out of univ with 0 hours of C++
training but a solid background in Ada95.  Guess what
happened now that I do games ;)

> When companies start using java as their
> primary, they will demand better tools, better performance, etc. I think that
> kind of large scale demand is just now starting. 

Er, no.  You don't start a critical project assuming that
the immature technology will have matured by the time you're
done with it.  What you *can* do is start some noncritical
apps just to explore and evaluate that new technology.
When you see the light with those apps and consider that
new tech as The Bomb, then you can put some weight behind
requests for better performance and/or hire more programmers
who can use it.  Until then, you just discard CVs where
Known Languages only lists "Java".

> I think that javas challenge
> will be in the next couple years, and if it's still around in 5, it will
> probably do to c++ what c++ did to C in the market (not fully replace it, but
> take more precedence in more projects)

I must confess that all of the above is largely "imho" and
"based on what I see around me".  I don't know how C++ eventually
became to dominate the software market -- you could actually
be right that it was the influx of C++ only guys ;)

Bert
-- 

-=<Short Controlled Bursts>=-

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