Lorenzo, Henning, all,
thank you very much for the interesting discussion about Java and
Erlang, you are certainly more knowledgeable than me about these
programming languages and I think that I'm going to learn more about
Erlang.
Ultimately it seems that the idea that I had of Java is basically
correct even if I was not aware of a lot of details. I have no
experience of Java programming, my only knowledge came from my work
where we have a lot of Java applications. Sometimes they throw stupid
exceptions and became unusable and they are so terribly slow and
memory hungry so I just hate them.
For the other side my feeling is also that Lua really *lacks* the
possibility of Java to detect errors before execution using a typing
system or something similar. The fact that you have no types at all
and no warnings of any kind even for a small typing error is terrible
when you develop something even moderately complex. In addition you
don't even have a debugger so it is even more painful. And yes I know
that some home-made 'strict' packages and debugger exists but they are
often incomplete and of little aid.
When I work in C or C++ I'm glad that many trivial and not-so-trivial
errors can be detected during compilation and, what a relief, I can
throw the debugger and inspect all the variables step-by-step when I
really don't understand.
This is even more OT but it is strictly related to the Java
discussion. Where Java is very strong Lua is terribly lacking :-) and
please, no flames, I don't want to be polemic, I express just some
reflections about a programming language, Lua, that I ultimately like
and use (beside C, C++ and python).
Francesco
