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Sun To Give StarOffice Java Flavor
ilovestuff writes "Sun Microsystems is building a Java-based development kit for its StarOffice software to help corporate programmers customise desktop applications, a move that better pits it against Microsoft's dominant Office. The software development kit will be available in the middle of next year as part of a minor upgrade to the business version of Sun's StarOffice 6.0, said Joerg Heilig, director of engineering for StarOffice at Sun."
Great, let's call it Javascript.
.NET debacle at Microsoft. Every single marketing manager decided that his own projects needed to be part of the .NET initiative. They all hopped on it and diluted its meaning. For all practical purposes ".NET" is basically the name that Microsoft is now associating with every latest version of most of its products, so it means nothing. (Yes, there is a very nice JVM ripoff in there somewhere, if you can find it without getting lost in the slick glossy .NET bullshit.)
JavaScript was horribly named by inept marketers at Netscape back in 1995. Its real name was "LiveScript" but they changed it at the last minute so they could coast on Java hype. It has nothing to do with Java and the name has been confusing people ever since. And "JavaScript" was a good name, too. It would be nice if BeanShell, for example, could be called "JavaScript" because that's actually what BeanShell is.
It's like the
IMHO if it's obvious that a programming language has been named by a marketer, that's a red flag. Java and C# were named by marketers. But at least nobody will confuse Java with coffee; that would be silly. But "C#" is as bad a name as "JavaScript". It's going to cause confusion with C and C++ (which are already confused for one another, and with Objective C, especially when HR managers scan people's resumes looking for keywords). And C# is nothing like C, or C++, or Objective C. I have to admit "C++" was a clever way to name a programming language that aspires to be (almost) a superset of C. But in that case the new name was a legal expression in the old one, it was a short, extremely descriptive name, and it made sense. C# fails on all three counts. They should have just named it "Me Too C".