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Sun Microsystems

U.S. Army Testing Jini 110

Posted by Roblimo from the you-young-soldiers-have-it-easy dept.
ion-flux writes "Sun Microsystems said several army bases in the U.S. are testing Jini to quickly create tactical operation centers which control, execute, and monitor battlefield maneuvers." No matter how smart you are, when you're under fire (literally) you can't deal competently with complex interoperability procedures. Of course, back in my Army days, we didn't even dream about things like Jini. Sure would have made our lives easier (and safer).
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U.S. Army Testing Jini More

U.S. Army Testing Jini

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  • Um, if Nobody cares, why are you posting about it? (Unless, of course, you are the "Nobody" referred to in your post.) Otherwise, why are you participating in this little shared piece of our culture? WTF?
  • Even though this strays us yet furthur off the current topic (what was it again?), I want to show that I agree that using Java technology on the battlefield may not be a wise decision. Im not completely brain washed by the military (yet), so I can and do often find faults in their decisions.
    Even furthur off topic though, we started the Vietnam war so it was our duty to try to end it. If it wasnt for the protestors, it would have ended much quicker since we would have been able to send a larger force in early in the war. By sending more troops we would have saved lives and still gained the military practice that made the Vietnam War so valuable.

  • It seems to me that it would prove useful to investigate the use of this ability to generate coherent signals from a processor as a method of connecting wireless devices. Your Jini laptop could use the processor as a resource and interact as it wished with other Jini. Phone lines could be identified electronically by the phone company, detectable by any technician or competent person with access to tools.

    Perhaps such things will come about. I remember reading an article once about networks of processors with switchable gates that could adapt to their surroundings; as I remember, they communicated through electromagnetic signals - interference, perhaps. Very strange; when they moved the processors, they stopped working. Ah, it was in Discover magazine [...] at one point; I'd recommend reading it with this information in mind; a room could be wired with a network of low-power sensors, for instance.

    Cool.

  • Java may be slow (although this will become less of a problem as computer speeds increase) but I don't agree that it is unstable. On the contrary, Java's lack of pointers, run-time type checking, and garbage collector make Java programs much less likely to crash than C/C++ programs.

    Of course, this assumes you are running your Java programs as programs, and not as applets in Netscape or IE...
  • Java will always be slow compared to native alternatives.

    Shell script, perl, and VB are also dog slow, but they are still useful. I wouldn't write a ray tracer in java, but a network client could easily be written in java ( or perl for that matter ), and the portability would offset the "speed" loss ( which is negligeable, since bandwidth is the main limitation in this example )

  • The fact that java is interpreted is as much a feature as it is a bug - it makes for faster development, because you don't need to recompile every time you make a silly error.

    Java has its uses, but writing games, ray tracers, and speed-critical apps are not among those uses. Some applications that are not at all speed critical, where java is very useful include network clients.

    As for Perl ? It's here to stay. I've just written a GUI FTP client for perl that's less than 1000 lines long. It took me about two days to get a working prototype. Let's see you do that in C++.

    Perl has some extremely useful features that make several tasks almost trivial ( for example, you can actually manipulate strings without going crazy. ) How many lines of code does it take to implement perl -npe 's/]*>//g' in C++ ?

  • Guess the Army guys got tired of rebooting their tanks after running Windows CE for 5 mins...


    - If at first you DO succeed, you're working too hard.
  • I've noticed. For that matter, I approve. :-)

  • hrmpf.. all armies should use MS technology(?). That should make'em think twice before starting any trouble.
  • yes, we do. the more their stuff sucks, the better we like it.The best military is equipped with 5 cent squirt guns, machines running on windows, with only Solitaire as installed software. now if every military organisation would use this, and only this, there would be a whole lot less war in this world.
  • Excuse me, what the hell are you talking about?
    Have you ever coded a single line in Java?
    Write, test, compare , and then come and post in slashdot.
  • Oh, someone thinks Hollywood creates documentaries?

    I met a Brazilian a few months ago who was worried about how safe any American city was due to all the gunplay. The next day I saw in a newspaper from his Brazilian town that 30 people had died of gunshots in one day (no mention of how many wounded), and it was in the back of the paper with minor news. 30 is much more than most American states, much less their cities.

  • Since Rob was in the army, I think his comments are more credible than
    some of these ACs who have never served. A person who is willing to give
    their life for the cause of freedom is a person who I admire. Go ROB!!!

    With that aside, JINI technology may fail the java is to complicated for
    cheap low end user products. Its like using a oil drill for a tooth pick.
    They should start out with something small that resembles java and is
    compatible with java but is geared towards small scale devices. I am not
    psychic but I don't believe people want to by a toaster to surf the web.
    On the other hand it would be cool if I could plug my keyboard into the TV
    and download the necessary files to make it a temporary word processor. Or
    turn my remote control into a virtual keyboard. Or maybe plug my
    playstation to my TV, tv to the network, and download new games playing
    with my remote control as the joystick with out downloading new driver
    software, the devices would just know how to interact correctly. If they
    play their cards right we won't even need a playstation and you can play
    directly over the network thru the TV. But I don't think we have evolved
    as a society to accept that technology yet. Plus it takes a long time to
    replace all of those cheap devices into those new JINI enabled devices.

  • Even if Sun succeeds in making Java the most stable platform of all, they will not remove that disclaimer. It doesn't mean it's unstable, it just means Sun is not responsible for life and death situations. Nor should they be.
  • I don't really think that not having all the source code is obscurity. If they didn't allow for exploits to be posted etc, that would be obscurity. I agree totally with open source, but if a person has the source code, it's alot eaiser to find exploits then if a person dosen't. Or at least that is my experince.
  • Case Study:



    Artillery unit A (our side) puts some rounds down range. The enemy (battery b) uses radar to find out where the rounds came from, and fires right back at A. At this point, A better pack up the LAN and guns and run or they die. Once they get some place safe, they have to put the LAN back together. Sometimes this can take hours, and the people who are tasked with doing that are too busy trying to fire back to remember what ifconfig does. Having Jini available as your first choice could cut this time dramatically.

    Even if JINI only works .01% of the time, that can still save thousands of lives.
  • With that aside, JINI technology may fail the java is to complicated for cheap low end user products. Its like using a oil drill for a tooth pick. They should start out with something small that resembles java and is compatible with java but is geared towards small scale devices. I am not psychic but I don't believe people want to by a toaster to surf the web.

    This is one of the big fallacies around Jini. It doesn't require a JVM, just a device that can communicate via RMI. If it is just sending out something pretty simple (and expecting something pretty simple in return), then all of this behavior can be hard-coded. A general-purpose computer (a JVM) doesn't need to be emulated.

    I haven't reviewed the Jini specs recently, but I'm pretty sure that a device which is only providing a service (or only needs a very simple service from another device) could be done fairly inexpensively without much CPU power.

    -jon

  • This article has seen a large number of subjective posts. Let's stick to the facts.

    JINI does not depend on a specific hardware platform, it only depends on the existence of a stable Java implementation. Now, many of us know that Java's AWT and Swing libraries have significant flaws and really can't be called stable by slashdot standards. But JINI does not require the AWT. As others have said, why would you want to surf the Web on your toaster? Even if you did, Win CE would take care of that for you. Win CE still uses WinMain(), I believe, which requires you to create a "window" before your application can be considered "behaved". JINI != Win CE.

    Now what does JINI do, then? Well, start with the fundamentals of Java: multithreading, garbage collection, dynamic code loading, platform independence, decent speed, and stability (as long as you don't use AWT). Null pointers and buffer overflows are hardly an issue when Java is implemented properly. Now add to that the benefit of JINI: automatic and reliable networking. It sounds just right for an environment where you don't have time to make sure your targeting computer has downloaded the coordinates from your high-security digital messenger device. It has to work perfectly every time.

    Now, let's look at where Java and JINI may fail. How big can a JINI network be before the devices start running out of RAM? Since any device can connect to any other device, each device on a "subnet" must know that each other device exists. If we went past the limit, would the whole network shut down? Would single devices mysteriously disappear? The military must consider this VERY CAREFULLY, because if the devices communicate via RF then it might be trivial for an enemy to shut down the network on a nearby ship just by broadcasting a few signals.

    Encryption is very important in this application. Every device would have to have its own public-key encryption implementation. But in reality, that's probably a plus for the military since any device of this kind, JINI or not, would have to support strong encryption, and there are already plenty of pretty good Java encryption implementations.

    (BTW--slightly related--I got that free FireCracker kit from x10.com and it's neat for controlling one light but if I used it for the whole house, anyone else who happened to have their own "clicker" could shut down all the lights in my house from 100 feet away. I hope most /.'ers realized this.)

    I have to believe Linux wouldn't quite fit the bill. By the time the kernel and the required supporting utilities were slimmed down to fit into 128K or so, it would no longer be Linux.
  • regardless of how advanced or mature their technology is.

  • Re:WW3 (Score:1)

    by Juln ( 41313 )
    yeah...just wait till they try to rocket jump.
  • Java may be the future of web scripts, but for real applications it cannot hold a candle to compiled languages such as C++. C++ is the future.

    You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

    The project that I'm working has just about finished an EJB (Enterprise Java Bean)-based server product. We're talking about 40K lines of code which does some highly cool stuff that I can't talk about just yet. It is hosted by a Pure Java application server called Weblogic. Our team of 4 people has been able to build this product incredibly quickly, with remarkable stabilty. We're also able to handle hundreds of simultaneous clients with response times Meanwhile, the group working on the client is building in C++. The client is a relatively simple program: send XML to the server, get back XML from the server, put some stuff on-screen based on the results, and repeat as necessary. The client group is woefully behind schedule, working in their "real" language.

    So, either I'm on a team of uber-geniuses compared to a team of untrained monkeys, or maybe, just maybe, building real-world applications is far easier, with excellent performance and scalability in Java.

    You decide.

    -jon

  • Java and Jini are immature technologies that should not be used in a life and death environment under any circumstances.

    Hmm... funny that. I've written a lot of defence software. Everything from mine warfare systems to counter-terrorist stuff to desktop simulators. One lot was written on SCO unix. Most unstable, unsupported POS you could imagine. My current work is Java based and is being used today in real war situations (yes, deployed on the big two way range).

    Of the two, the Java is the most stable and best piece of software according to the users. Now, to give you an idea of exactly how much better Java is in a defence environment that native code - the original app was 200K lines of code written in 8 weeks (and an estimated 800 litres of Coke/Jolt to accompany it). That was a piece of code for a tender for a paid prototype software. They were so impressed that 6 weeks after signing the contract the system went operational with almost minimal changes. Now this is not just your average army unit either - the local Special Forces (Oz SAS - US equivalent of the Rangers/SEALs). The success of this is such that we roll out new versions of the software every 6 weeks which they happily install and run with. Try doing that with native code software (Yes, we used to do really big monolithic Ada/C software here as well so I do know how long it takes).

    Sun, by contrast, has never given up control of the language. Is sun going to decide to raise prices or terminate a license on the DOD in the middle of an operation?

    That has got to be the biggest POS that I have read in a long time. Maybe you should actually look at Java at some time. Sun controls the language specification. They aren't the only supplier of runtime environments or development environments. There is no dependency on Sun. How can you pull a license to a specification when one was never granted in the first place? What do you think the CLASSPATH, Blackdown and other similar projects are all about. You might as well argue about what would happen if Borland pulled the license on Delphi in the middle of an operation, or MS with VB (there is more military code written in VB than ADA).

    Next time, grab a clue stick before talking about something you obviously have NFI about.

  • The same could be said for joining a corporation.

    If you think soldiers should vote on whether to take cover or advance I'm glad you aren't interested in a military career. :)

    I think you're joking, but you bring up a good point anyway.

    Many probably aren't interested in a career in waste disposal or processing either, but that's no excuse for dissing those that are. There's this weird thing called "service" that some folks actually believe in, and that helps get the unpleasant tasks of society accomplished. More politicians should believe - they are the real cause of misapplications of military force.


  • The Army is testing it, but Sun's website makes it seem like it's years away...just how complete/robust is the version the Army is using? Do we really want the armed forces using Jini v0.01 or whatnot?
  • Dude, it's just a binfmt-esque hack... and it's even being phased out because binfmt does precisely the same thing, while being somewhat more general about it...
    ---
  • That's true to a point but I think that one of the main reasons is that both aircrafts and nuclear power facilities are very time-critical applications.

    Nah, I've seen the same thing of Motorola real-time contollers. It's a standard clause on any sort of embedded component, and doesn't have anything to do with the capabilities or limitations of the product. Everything has bugs, and Sun is just covering their butts.
  • Jini in a bottle

    make your wish come true

    (and power your army!)

  • hmm.. (Score:1)

    by Drath ( 50447 )
    This is my Jini. There are many like it but this one is mine.
  • You got to be kidding. My system (P200/96MB/Warp 4) runs Java apps extremely fast. Every single time something has failed it has been because of the application, not the Java environment. What you are referring to might be all of those worthless applets out there. The difference between applets and real applications in Java is huge.
  • (sorry if this went out twice, accidentally punched "submit") Doesn't the Java license have a clause that says it shouldn't be used in life-or-death situations, i.e. nuclear power plant controls, aircraft traffic control, etc, since Java is still an 'unstable' technology? Isn't WAR one of these sorts of life-or-death situations?
  • Sure it's slow as hell right now, and unstable. But think of Linux 4 years ago. As machines become faster, java will also be more stable. Your are also showing your ignorance of java by saying that java applets, are java.

    Java sucks and will probably always suck on computers. But on imbeded devices such as small NC's and set top boxes your crazy if you would take WinCE over java. Your need to read a bit more about java before your open your mouth, and show the world your ignorance.
  • Hey all you ACs, you are a bunch of typical lazy shitheads who enjoys the benefits of all who have served their country and even sacrificed their lives. You don't have to like the military or want to be part of it in order to appreciate their contributions. Admitedly military service is not for everyone, but at least have enough respect to recognize what they've accomplished.

    Go back to your self-indulgent stink hole of an existance.

    besides.your'e not even brave enough to get an account here. Typical.
  • And the open implementation of the Cruise Missile is where?

    You don't have to be open to work.
  • Sorry about my obscene language. I do truly have a large vocabulary, but I feel that this description truly shows what I think about Java. Java may be the future of web scripts, but for real applications it cannot hold a candle to compiled languages such as C++. C++ is the future. While it may not still be called C++ in a few years, it will be another language that is the same thing only with more features. I would rather go back to using Pascal or even Cobol and Fortran than be stuck using Java or Perl. While I think languages such as Lisp may become more prominent once genetic algorithms are used more, I dont think Java will ever be a widely used language in the future. At least I sure hope not.
  • I can certainly understand the reasons for keeping open source software out of mission critical military situations. However, unless the military is going to take action to put a military level barricade around Sun's source repository (which would include extensive background checks for employees to prevent foreign agents from getting access to the source), then using a closed source solution is NOT safer than an open source solution, and may even be MORE of a hazard.
  • A presentation on this subject was made at JavaOne. The PDF file with the slides can be found at http://industry.java.sun.com/javaone/99/event/0,17 68,742,00.html
  • It doesn't mean it's unstable, it just means Sun is not responsible for life and death situations. Nor should they be.

    That's true to a point but I think that one of the main reasons is that both aircrafts and nuclear power facilities are very time-critical applications. You wouldn't want the Garbage Collector to start up when trying to open emergency venting on your soon-to-be smoking hole in the ground... :) Ribo

  • I can't help pondering if this meant the US Army is being deliberately closed-mouth, or if the Reuters reporter was was merely stating the fact that whichever one "official" he picked at random happened to be in the latrine when called...
  • They had a talk at the JavaOne conference about this very thing. The talk was extremely interesting, especially since I'd been going to a lot of differnet Jini talks throughout the week...it's a cool technology.

    And before I go on, it's Jini, not JINI.

    Three guys gave the talk; Dennis Reedy from Sun, Dr. David Usechak from the US Army, and Leo Yeung from IBM. The talk was titled Using Jini Technology as the Integrating Architecture for Next Generation Battlefield Systems.
    Basically this is for mobile command units, four trucks (I'm trying to remember) that fit together some how with workstations on the inside as well as routers and so forth. Basically, this command unit has to move about every 2+ hours. One problem is that once they move they need over an hour to set back up again; feed the twisted pair about, and get all the software connected. What a pain in the ass huh? So they said Jini was perfect for them. Any device or application can find each other if they need to. If they set it up right everything will work how it really should. For instance, when you plug in a phone to a phone jack, you expect to hear the dialtone when you lift it off the hook right? That's how computers should work on the network. Also, keep in mind, that the Jini Lookup Service isn't /just/ for devices. Any Java OBJECT can be put in the lookup service. That can be ANYTHING!
    It makes me giddy anytime I think about it. :)
    The presenters gave a very well thought out speech and do know what they're talking about. I have faith that this project will be successful.

    Ribo
  • Yes, the *general* Java license does. But Sun are
    free to license Java to the US military is any way it wants. The life/death clause is there to avoid
    liability.
  • Vaccine!! Vaccine!! Vaccine!!
    Court Marshall!! Court Marshall!!

    Maybe they already found a way to incorporate Jini into nano-chips contained within the Anthrax vaccine. No wonder.
  • This is the most hackneyed myth in American culture

    No argument there, but...

    Firstly, American soldiers haven't fought to directly defend American lands or citizens in over a century.

    This isn't even close to true. Aside from the fact that Flanders isn't nearly as far away from Kansas as it was a few hundred years ago, American soil saw fighting the World Wars. Remember Pearl Harbor? There were Japanese attacks on Alaska, as well. And plenty of American civilians died to German subs.

    WW1 is a dicier affair, but we finally entered because Germany was talking to Mexico about an invasion. Would you rather we wait until the fighting was in Texas?
  • compiled languages such as C++

    Um, Java is a "compiled language such as C++". Are you sure you're not thinking of the totally unrelated Javascript?

    C++ had it's day, and people are thankfully waking up to the realization it's an ugly beast, and choose productive languages like Java or Smalltalk instead.

  • Hey all you ACs, you are a bunch of typical lazy shitheads who enjoys the benefits of all who have served their country and even sacrificed their lives.

    That was then, this is now: Did USA come to East Timor's aid when Indonesia invaded? Nope. Would they have given a rat's ass about Kuwait if Kuwait didn't have a lot of oil? Nope.

    Weapon technology is often sold to all sides in a conflict, and your precious army is sent in to protect commercial interests. War is no longer some "serve the country" thing, it's serve the buck.

    But, hey, just buy the propaganda that what happened fifty years ago has any relevance when it comes to today's military apparatus. The only people profiting from today's wars are the arms merchants who get to replenish the bombs wasted on e.g. Yugoslavia, with no responsibility for the civilian lives taken by their cluster bombs going off long ater. They just count the dollars the governments are more than willing to spend.

  • First, the conflict in Viet Nam was technically a "police action" similar to that in Korea. 2. The US was asked for technical and military air by a legally constituted government in S. Viet Nam. We shall leave for the time being the question of corruption and whether the US intelligence Community supported this government beyond its useful life. 3. The escalation of the conflict to include US fighting troops (beyond the initial "advisor" role was based on an invitation to assist from the the S. Viet Nam government. 4. In virtually all logical accounts, the North Vietnamese regular army and the Viet Cong lost the conflict militarily. 5. The failure of the US military and its allies in the Viet Nam conflict to "win" overall was almost completely due to the strong political input to the selection of targets and campaigns. Tactical target selection from Washington is a poor way to run a war. Further, denying warfighters the opportunity to hit known strategically important targets (we aren't talking nukes, kiddies, we're talking large-scale impact on warfighting) such as anti-air assets, harbor wharfs and load-handling facilities, railroad assets communicating with principal suppliers of war materiale, etc., has profound impacts on morale and discipline. The final loss of the country to the North Vietnamese was a result of a number of bad political decisions forced upon a warfighting military capable (and proven so) of winning that conflict. The apparent loss was highlighted in the popular press, but never told the real stories of overwhelming military successes... body counts don't tell it all, but ability to mobilize coherent fighting forces do, and the VC and NVA were unable to do that in real terms by the time we withdrew... in disarray. One significant thing to come out of this debacle was an effective remaking of the US military structure. Officers who saw the problems inflicted upon the US military sought to prevent that from happening agian. Operations in Panama, the 1992 Desert Shield/Desert Storm operation and in Kosovo have shown that by designating political goals and objectives, then keeping the political hacks out of the direct planning, missions can be carried through. Sorry if your facts are in error.
  • First of all, Jini has nothing to do with RMI. The dependancy consists solely of the use of java.rmi.RemoteException, which encapsulates entirely generic network exception semantics (and so could have been in an entirely separate package).

    Secondly, how the heck is a 40K VM too big?
    http://java.sun.com/products/kvm

    (BTW, I work for Sun, but I'm speaking for myself)
  • >besides.your'e not even brave enough to get an >account here. Typical.

    And getting an account at slashdot is JUST SO SCARY.
  • Heh, good one:).
  • I think that its sick when snot nosed punks such as you think that military service is a waste of time. You are just as bad as those idiots who protested against the Vietnam War. Military service is one of the single most important things a person could do during his life. We have the benefit of living in such a free and safe country because of all the brave men that have served and are serving in the military. I have tried to join both the Marines and Navy, but alass I cannot because of eczema, a form of skin disorder. But since I cannot join I am not going to turn around and say that military service in not worth while just because I am not part of it. While military service is not for everyone, every member of our Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, and Coast Guard deserve every American's respect. We are the greatest nation since Rome, and they have made us that way.
  • "we didn't even dream about things like Jini."

    Was that meant to be a play on "I Dream of Genie"? If so, well done!
  • The military has always been an important driver of technology (with roots from Enigma code cracking) as it is one of the few industry sectors that can ignore commercial returns on interest or practical coding considerations (can we say Ada here?). As such, the experimentation with Jini is a very important win for Sun as a successful rollout can establish a long-term commercial need for Java (once the US industrial-complex mandates the federal "need" for Java, imagine the profit nargins!). Compared with some of the negative press about Windows crippling an AEGIS (someone correct my memory if I'm wrong), if the perception of Jini/Java as a SECURE network interoperability framework takes off, then Sun are in clover. Of course whether the reality matches perception, only the coders and marketers know for certain. It is odd that in an industry with replacement cycles of less than 3 years, long-term credibility is still key to convincing people whether to adopt a given technology or not (or maybe it is not a contradiction after all when you consider the investment in training).




    As a side note, the issue of perception came up in another thread, the Brazillian who worried about "unnecessary" violence in American cities then ignoring the "real" local killings, it does touch on a very important issue of perceived vs actual crime levels. Studies have shown that often a public's fear of events is way out of proportion with the actual frequency (thus the popularity of travel insurance when the airline industry has the best statistical passenger=mile safety record). Given the rather consistent message coming from Hollywood, it's not surprising that the rest of the world thinks the US consist of right-wing gun-totting ex-military thugs (die hard, etc) or mindless love-sick clueless dorks (sleepless in seattle etc). The reality is that the average person around the world would be pretty much indistinguihable as most societies converge to a norm given comparative social-economic levels. However the perception (or taken to the extreme - cultural mythology) is a very important driver for a lot of individual actions. Witness the US glorious history in westerns with the calvery opening up the frontier that has extended through 2 world wars and many regional conflicts. This has resulted in giving the US a global absolute advantage in organised violence, especially with the continual recruitment of citizen soldiers (a la Roman Empire style) based on an personal commitment to freedom. We should all salute the US model where the common solider is prepared to give up their lives so that their commander-in-chief can play around with interns. Now IMHO that is a strong military system based on its own internal memes which will persist and remain vigilant to its mission regardless of perceptions or reality of civilian leadership.


    LL

  • Of course it was intentional! Glad someone was smart enough to pick up on it in between all the pro and anti-military sidetracking. ;-)
  • Then you must have been using a Java word processor when you typed in your e-mail.
  • Continuing this headlong leap offtopic, I'd like to point out that one can respect and honor the military (as both you and I do) and disagree strongly with the political decision (by our civilian leadership) to use them in a given situation.

    IMHO, protesting against the Vietnam war was an honorable act. Spitting on returning soldiers (most of whom were draftees) was utterly despicable.

    -Doug

  • how many patches did they have to use to get that sun software working?
    ...
  • Your arguments are true... but irrelevant. By extension of that logic everything would be written in assembly or C. However, while I'm truly a C bigot ;), I do write many little administrative tasks as shell scripts. People actually use Perl (gasp!) in web server applications. Need I point out that Perl "will always be slow compared to native alternatives"?

    Different tasks lend themselves to optimization for machine performance, speed of development, simplicity, manageability, executable size, portability, etc.

    So, yes, Java will always be slow[er], but I guess I'm prepared to deal with it. ;)
  • You mention the similarities that Java has with both Lisp and C++. I could to the same and talk about the similarites betwean Linux and Windows. Since they do have some similarities, they must both be completely equal.

    While I do fault Lisp for being interpreted, its benefits far overwiegh this one downfall. And the similarites betwean C++ and Java are almost only in syntax and OOP use. Java is both slow and has no increased functinality over C++. Like I said, Java and Perl are the future of simple web scripts, but that is where there uses end. Of course you can make good applications with it, but you can do the same with QBasic. In fact, I think I would rather go back to QBasic than use Java regularly. Now as for GWBasic, that im not sure about.
  • probably any application in any language

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