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[Prisoner at War]

You mean clientside here I think, right?

And know you know why I have trouble with JavaScript and CSS!!

Java is still going strong on the server.
And yes, applets are disappearing clientside, probably partly because
JavaScript grew strong in the last years, and partly because JavaScript
is easy to learn compared to Java.

Me, I would prefer JavaScript simply 'cause it's more
"invisible"...you always know when Java's being used -- the machine or
at least the browser stalls for like half a minute loading the Virtual
Machine or Java Console or whatever....

(I must add that 'mastering' JavaScript is another story, but doing
simple things like formvalidation, image manipulation, etc are easy to
learn.)

Yeah, I would be "satisfied" knowing only enough to do the simple
stuff, though I would dearly love to be a real programmer! There's
just so much I can envision...but my ambitions outpace my abilities by
far! By far!!

 

[Joost Diepenmaat]

How do you measure "power" of a programming language at all?

There is "computational power", but both are Turing-complete, so that's
moot.

There is "expressive power": How easy do you express what you mean?
I.e., how short, but still readable, can you express the solution
to a problem.

That's the "power" I meant.

I can't say which one wins here. Closures in Javascript and classes in
Java are both good at this. The greater standard library of Java
increases the expressive power whe dealing with non-trivial
algorithms, by introducing more "primitives", but Java is more verbose
too.

And not only is java more verbose by default, it's also impossible
(without a preprocessor or custom compiler, but that would be cheating)
to decrease its verbosity in certain key areas. I'm thinking especially
about closures - java doesn't (yet?) have them, and you have to emulate
them via instances of explicitly defined custom classes. On the other
hand, it's relatively easy to mimic classes in javascript with syntax
that's probably just a bit less verbose than java's (without going into
the general merit of doing so).

Al said though, I still think javascript is much more verbose than it
could have been.

Any other powers?

Dynamic typing is a bit win usually. Especially combined with some sort
of OO system. OTOH, having an overly static and explicit type system
definitely helps with static analisys tools (think code completion).

J.