Do you even understand garbage collection in Java? Do you understand the benefits of an Object Oriented Language?

In a language such as C or COBOL, anyone can operate on the data. That makes about as much sense as setting the speed of your car by allowing anyone to set the needle on the speedometer.

In Java, you send messages to the object and it manipulates the speed. This more closely matches real life where you send a message to your car to speed up when you press the accelerator pedal.

The garbage collector works by freeing memory occupied by orphaned objects. Something that is event driven may not be able to free memory as it doesn't know if that memory is or isn't still in use.

The garbage collector is able to see if an object is still being referenced, and therefore still in play. If it's not, then the object can be collected and the memory for that object returned to the heap of free memory.

The downside of course is if the garbage collector thread never gets to run, the program grows.

BTW, I was in Sun's very first class of Java instructors, sent out to evangelize Java. It has it's faults, but GC isn't really one of them. OOP more closely matches the real world, and better protects data. But it's more difficult up front, especially for guys like me that did C and Assembly for decades before Java.

Ex,
I understand Fred's point of view. Back in the days of very limited memory, programmers had to write elegant code, and they had no room for memory leaks and unreleased memory.

I real-time systems like spacecraft on long missions, running on 8-bit processors with a few Kilobytes of RAM, there is no one to reboot the system. Stack overflows and math errors which create exceptions today, to be trapped by default handlers, were not there to cover a programmer's sloppiness or lack of failure mode analysis.

I helped developed a Pascal-like OOP language for DARPA in the late 1970s to demonstrate the feasibility and power in modeling real world mechanical systems, but I don't like or use Java, either.

I wrote 6809 Assembly code in the 80's for a machine tool firm. I eventually wrote a 6809 uP emulator to run on an 80x86 so we could test our code there before we burnt it to EPROM, not EEPROM, EPROMs that were erased with a UV light.

So I appreciate the detail required during those days. Perhaps not to the extent the programmers for the Apollo program, but still I was close enough to that era to have a feel for it.

We thought we were in heaven when I was able to redesign the circuit boards for the machines so we could access 32K of memory with the 6809 instead of the 16K we were originally using.

That was when PC boards were layed out not with a computer, but with "stickers" and clear plastic sheets.

Ah, the old Exormax. One line of code at a time on a LCD display.
When the Apple Mac came out, they gave away a Lisa with each one, until they ran out. One of the EEs brought in the Lisa and made that our 6809 programming system. The 6809 was, and is, a great chip. The single board computers which came out for the 6809 and Z80 in the mid 1980s were wonders to my work.

With this new 2,300 page "Financial Reform Act", and the 5,000 pages of regulations to be created from the sloppy legislation, I find my financial clients and investor friends all at a standstill. Even the professional investors and traders are afraid to make a move now.

It's amazing. The incumbents are making all the same mistakes that resulted in the miserable Carter years. "Stimulus???" Hah!

I have some facts and charts on attempts at Keynesian stimulus spending from 1930 to 2010. Yes, it was Herbert Hoover who tried it first. FDR ran against Hoover's spending, then when in office, doubled it. Sound familiar?

As government taxation and spending becomes a larger component of the economy, the less impact more deficit spending has on the private sector. And this stimulus spending has mostly been government sector jobs. Of the $860 billion authorized, only $400 billion has been spent in 16 months, not enough to move the needle.