On Sep 30, 2008, at 6:21 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
IOW, Java hasn't solved the problem in the last 10 years.
Java is already really bad at being a small little language to write cooperating tools in. I'd never even attempt to write a little pipeline filter in Java -- I've already pretty much learned to expect Java applications to be in their own world, so I'd hardly find it surprising if a Java app could only read files it wrote itself, nevermind files in odd encodings. Python, on the other hand, is an awesome tool for writing small little scripts that interact well with the surrounding environment, Just The Way It Is, without trying to layer so much abstraction upon it so that you lose functionality. Moving away from that would be unfortunate. James