FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Jamie Zawinski]

Phil Muldoon wrote:
> 
> It's difficult to rank one language, package, or set of tools over
> another,

No, it's really not.  Useful metrics include:

  - how many of the critical packages already depend on them;
  - how many widely-used packages are written in them.

Regardless of your opinions of the merits of the Java language, it's
just not heavily used by any of the things that desktop users bump into
every day.  (Except, *possibly*, web page applets, but I gather you're
talking about a much bigger scope than that.)

You may argue that it would be more heavily used if it was more widely
available, but I don't think language advocacy is a good enough reason
to make people download more stuff that they don't *yet* want or need.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski      jwz at jwz.org                  http://www.jwz.org/
                    jwz at dnalounge.com      http://www.dnalounge.com/
                                         http://jwz.livejournal.com/