[Editorial note: I titled this Juxtapose this with the intent of juxtaposing things, and then failed to do so. Starbucks, don't fail me now.]
Having woken up at 4:30a and having further unsuccessfully attempted to get back to whatever dream it was that I had been in the middle of, I got out of bed. I haven't been blogging or reading blogs much lately due to too many other obligations lately.
I dropped by the Dallas .NET User Group Tuesday to see Brian Moore, a local MS Developer Evangelist demo some of the new .NET winforms bits. He showed a lot of the cool, make it trivial for the developer to create robust, clickonce deployable, office-class applications via drag-n-drop. Fair warning, peeps. Some of you may be out of a job soon, because trained monkeys will be able to do your job [while eating bananas.]
I checked in on Tim Bray this morning for the first time in a while. He is going on (get it? ha ha, I am so clever, um, eh hmm, er... maybe I need more coffee) about the ramifications of chip multithreading and multi-core on the poor, hapless developer. And I think he is spot on, at least sort of. You probably ought to have at least a background thread (HA, even more clever!!!! um, er...) spinning on this stuff, because, barring some brilliant breakthroughs in quantum physics (which could be coming), this is coming. Fair warning, peeps. Some of you may be out of a job soon, because only trained physicists will be able to do your job [while eating bananas.]
Oh, and Tim, to answer your question, my experience with Java's support for threading is that it sucked donkey balls compared to .NET's. (I wonder how well we'll do). In the interest of partial disclosure, mine is a 1996-2003 point of view on Java. I haven't played with 1.5, so your mileage may vary with respect to the integrated support for a lot of the abstractions that Doug Lea, et al. have developed on the Java side and java's further integration with the various platform's native concurrency constructs. But at a glance, it appears that .NET has had most of the key primitives that enable the rest of the abstractions for a good while now. Granted, it is easier on a single platform. The .NET 2.0 beta bits help out with some of the other low level constructs, but my impression from browsing the javadocs is that Java wins in shear number of classes available to the developer now. The current gap is just a hack or two away from parity, though.
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