Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Packages up for grabs

[james <garftd@verizon.net>]

On 08/07/2016 09:06 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 07/08/2016 15:32, Kent Fredric wrote:
>>> Let them use java* codes, as that is what all the universities are
>>>> teaching and promoting. I agree
>>>> with gentoo proper on severely restricting java*,  on gentoo-proper,
>>>> but that sort of thing is killing gentoo and just appears to the open
>>>> world as a filter mechanism to keep out and go elsewhere, snoot.
>>>> There are just too many exciting and useful codes out there running
>>>> java.
>> "All" ? Some. And the dominance and focus on Java is itself telling of
>> the quality and type of the education provider.
>>
>> Some education providers may not touch Java at all, and focus
>> predominantly on C.
>>
>> You can't satisfy everyone out of the box.
>>
>
>
> I have no idea where James gets his information from, but I suspect it's
> a niche market where uni students do "clustering" - whatever that is.

I spend a lot of time "hooping" with college kids in a variety of 
venues. College kids and adults, from around the world visit the hoop 
venues in Central Florida. Lots of kids who are not CS majors are 
involved in coding, and java reigns supreme, imho, as the most often 
cited programming language they use, because professors and employers 
alike dictate that on them.

Also Just look at the job boards and the new projects springing up on 
github. Sure python is very popular. But, I cannot think of a single 
distro that offer java and precludes python, so why not have both.

Yes java is popular in rich environments where jobs in the cloud or on 
an internal cluster contain java codes. Most kids only use the cloud and 
are not 'full stack' aware or part of the foundation of the resources 
they code for.


> The interesting apps out there are mostly running python, go and
> (sometimes) lua. And that's what I observe in my day job -
> business/mobile ISP.


Look at the job listing on stackoverflow and elsewhere (java) is very 
popular when they list several programming languages to meet the 
requirements. I'm not promoting java, at all, but just stating that it 
is very popular, on new projects (but not all) and it is a large and 
frequent requirement, dictating by employers. Kids coming out of college 
want a job, more than anything, and most are having java crammed down 
their throats. So we should  find a way to robustly
support those that need java. Nothing is precluding other languages
in my message. Personally I avoid java, unless it is critical to
a code or family of codes I need to run.


hth,
James