Ted:
> How confident are you that the analogy of the Embedded systems developer
> movement from assembly language to C holds true for their potential
> movement from C to Java?
Your comparison of C programming to the complexities of Java is an apples
and oranges comparison.
First off....no programmer can learn enough in 3 weeks to write good desktop
GUI-based apps or scalable server-side (J2EE/XML) solutions, regardless of
what language they pick. To learn to be a good programmer in any language
(if it's your first) takes years, as you discovered. But this is not a valid
comparison to a proposed Embedlet programming environment. You won't
need Swing, XML parsing, most Java libraries, large inheritance hierarchies,
UML or all the rest. Since the subset of Java that you need to know will be so
much smaller, it might be possible to write credible Embedlets much faster.
The corrollary is that you can hack simple stuff together easily in almost any
language, including Java. You can create a main() method, and just string a
bunch of code in there to do something simple....and surprisingly enough, it
will look almost identical (syntatically) to C code.
If you want to write well structured, maintainable, performing complex
applications, then it's gonna take you a long time to learn how to do that. In
Java, C or anything else for that matter.
So if the existing embedded programmers are just hacking simple stuff, it
should be possible to provide an Outpost container that lets them continue to
do just that...with a minimum of Java knowledge required (OO stuff), especially
since Java and C syntax are not that far apart (if/then/else, while, for and such
are all pretty similar). As James said, they should only have to learn a very
small subset of the gamut of Java skills to be able to hack out Embedlets.
As I had said in an earlier post....a good tutorial and example should go a long
way to get them there.
> It has been my daily experience that it takes years of extremely hard work for
> a person to become a competent Java programmer.
The above sentence would be even more accurate if you drop the word
"Java". ;-)
We don't need competent Java programmers......what we need are people that
can construct small, simple Embedlets and then wire them together.
Andrzej Jan Taramina
Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions
http://www.chaeron.com
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