Sorry, I had to reply to this! Arkadiy Vertleyb wrote:
"Andy Little" <andy@servocomm.freeserve.co.uk> wrote
The builtin GUI is a major reason for Java's Success.
I think the major reason for Java's (commersial) success is that it has _commersial_ forces behind it. As opposed to C++, that is mainly moved forward by academics and enthusiasts.
(I think you mean commercial) You forgot pretty much every industry that needs to have programs that _work_, and quickly, ie. every telephone system in the world has some C++, normally a /LOT/ of it, controlling routing, etc... A large sector of the commercial software industry uses C++ (all of Adobe's programs, for example). If you've played a computer game in the last 5 years, it *was* written in C++. C++ is almost always at or near the top of the list of languages that are being considered to implement a new project. I would die of old age before I could list everyone who uses C++. I'm sure Stroustrup is kicking himself for not making C++ "commercial". Why, he could have 700,000 programmers using C++ *right now*, just like Java (claims)! As opposed to the 1.5 million he currently has.
If we were to make C++ commersially successfull, we would now be developing threads, all kinds of networking, and database access, like crazy. But since we are here mostly to have fun, gain an experience, write articles, etc., we are busy with MPL and PP, lambdas and binders, parsers and regular expressions, foreach and typeof, etc., etc., etc. Things that are cool, and useful for language development, but hardly ever considered when somebody has to decide in which language to implement a distributed concurrent system.
Oh yes, it's nearly /impossible/ to get a database, networking or threading library for C++. And I'm sure no one will ever find a use for parsers or regular expressions. And gosh! MPL! What a waste of time to let the compiler do all the work for you! OK, enough sarcasm. (Don't take it too seriously)
(I hope nobody gets offended. The above libraries are provided for example only, and without any hint to their relative importance)
As for GUI, the last time I saw a portable one, it sucked. Yes, I admit, it was 5 years ago, and it was AWT, so maybe thins changed drammatically? Are modern GUI libraries really able to produce _decent_ cross-platform GUI?
Yep. See other posts here for details. The /real/ reason Java is successful is because they have a pretty good marketing team. They don't try to sell Java to programmers (the last thing we need is yet another language based on C++, but proprietary). Oh no, they sell Java to managers. Having a lot of money to sell it with helps as well. Don't take this the wrong way. All I mean is just because you don't see full page ads for how C++ will help your business in every industry newsletter, doesn't mean it's not doing well. (Although you won't be hard pressed to find PR guys to tell you it's a "legacy" language. I wonder who they work for?) No, I don't make money on C++, apart from programming in the language ;-)