 r robert harley harley argote ch writes r glm wrote and a java program due to the extensive class libraries will weigh in at NUMBER the number of lines of the equivalent c program qed r there are massive amounts of libraries for c fortran and so r on to pick an obvious example if you want to do linear r algebra then java isn t a serious candidate at all if you want to do http c gets pretty muddy curl is about the best choice i ve found but i grant you that no language is the be all and end all i envy some of those posting to this list i ve been in business for NUMBER years and i haven t yet had the luxury of writing every line of code for any project we are always coerced by budgets and time to maximize the amount of work done elsewhere as much as i hate dealing with someone else s blackbox as much as i ve spent sleepless nights second guessing external libs i ve never ever had the luxury to do otherwise it must be wonderful to be responsible for something you are actually responsible for and i am so sick of being blamed for other people s design mistakes maybe there s an archive somewhere i need to know about but i ve been using c since drdobbs first published smallc and yet i ve never found any decent lgpl libs cataloged in such a way that i can just type in the task and get back an api because of javadoc which is by no means perfect java provides me the second best catalog of NUMBERrd party libs second only to perl s cpan perl is one language i also really hate with a passion yet end up using the most for exactly this reason for example take the recent cbc olympics site i needed to roll together a telnet client with a tokenizer perl regex preprocessing a stream to produce parseable xml project that xml into relational databases using only the dtd to generate the rdbms schema and open an xmlrpc interface to read and post items into the news stream where can i find c libs for those components on the webserver we then needed a multithreaded read only http socket which can spawn persistent data caching servlets that periodically refresh themselves over socket connections to the relational database presenting the retreived values through xslt defined transforms and again where can i find such stuff for c or for any other langauge but java wombat servlet spec for perl was inviting but it s not ready for prime time and re inventing that entire shopping list in c is just not feasible for one programmer to do inside of NUMBER weeks when you need c libs or even c libs where s the best place to shop where do you find standards based portable rdbms api odbc how do you evaluate these things without actually fetching every one and trying it out in a perfect universe i d use ocaml or even ruby but i don t see the social infrastructure for either happening during my professional lifetime r why do so many people outside of sun s marketing department r consider java to be write once debug everywhere a collegue at cognos henk called c the nearly portable assembler gary lawrence murphy garym teledyn com teledynamics communications inc business advantage through community software URL computers are useless they can only give you answers pablo picasso 