Computers 'n stuff.....

It's the middle of the night, the bathroom's still here, and so am I - and now that I'm awake, what next? I don't smoke, don't drink, and I'm too old & ugly to chase girls. So it will have to be something else....

With all the recent fuss about Oracle's Java, and its seemingly ongoing vulnerabilities, and the related confusion among some of us about the differences, if any, between Java and the similarly-named JavaScript, I thought I'd look it up. Turns out it's almost an apples-and-oranges thing. Java is a programming language, while JavaScript is a scripting language. Kissing cousins, but with different uses in different situations.

To borrow from Yahoo Answers, a programming language is structured code which needs to be compiled, or converted into machine language, before it is run, and when it is run, it runs all at once to create a program. A scripting language is generally used within a program to issue commands that are read line by line and then executed. Once a programming language has been compiled into machine code, it can be run any number of times without re-compiling, but a scripting language has to be interpreted each time it is run and is therefore usually slower because a separate program needs to read the code, interpret it, and then follow its instructions.

So why do Java and JavaScript have such similar names if they are different? Partly because they were both developed by the same people at Sun Microsystems back in the mid-nineties, and because of legal reasons and lack of imagination, both ended up with similar names. That's how it seems to me, anyway...

And speaking of Java, they've announced yet another patch to fix this latest hole in it which allowed the bad guys to get into it. Problem is, we're told this latest attack was made possible because they didn't completely or properly patch it the last time. So how do we know they've properly corrected the mistakes this time? We don't. So it's all about faith - either you have it or you don't. Me? I think I'll wait a while to re-install Java. This rig seems to run OK without it, so I'm in no rush....