[clug] Why isn't Java popular on the Linux Desktop?

[Francis James Whittle]

On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 21:33 +1000, Sam Couter wrote:

A bunch of stuff we don't need to quote 'coz the list archives it....

> Because files and streams are different, and shouldn't duplicate each
> others interfaces.

Most of what you said, it's all point of view to me, and I'm happy for C
and C++ to treat everything as integers when doing the actual
referencing because I know what the abstract concept we call objects
looks like (or at least I have the information to tell me so in a .h
file).

Files and streams being different however - no.  Files are a type of
stream.  Even Java admits this, because a file is an extension of a
stream.
But also, files are a type of stream that you normally want to read in a
buffered way, and often you want to know which part of this stream
you're in.  So it makes sense to either (a) extend the file to have a
buffered variant, or (b) have flags on the file to determine whether we
need buffering or not.  But no, Java has to have an entirely different
class for accessing a stream (that it has a reference to, it doesn't
inherit from it) in a buffered way.  It's like it can't decide if it's
object-orientated or not.