Posted by
CowboyNeal
on from the eye-to-the-future dept.
newdaemon writes "Fortune
has a candid
interview
with Bill Joy about what he plans to do after leaving Sun and his opinions on many other topics, including his strong dislike of the C programming language and how the internet could evolve to take care of the problem of spam and viruses."
Re:computer inept?
by
Zocalo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, this is standard practice, or should be, and not just in the IT industry either. By having a company engineer disconnect the network, collect any company owned kit, etc. there is an audit trail that exonerates the ex-employee from any allegations of misappropriation of those resources.
The problem with Outlook isn't "C," the problem with outlook is Javascript, VBScript, and Windows Scripting Host, which are PRECISELY the sorts of high-level languages [and their interpreters]
Err no. He's definetly not an idiot (SUN anyone?) and he's not a liar. What he means by this is that as Outook is written in C, buffer over/underruns can happen which is what most viruses exploit (they then proceed to use high level languages such as Javascript etc. to get the email addresses and broadcast spam and viruses). But the primary problem is that oulook has security holes, usually buffer over/underruns. This is not _because_ of C, but what he's saying (and he's mostly right) is that if outlook was written in Java, there would be NO buffer underruns.
that this little terd is advocating.
Or is he just a common liar? I dunno - you be the judge.
Oopps, I have probably been trolled. My bad.
Re:Idiot or Liar?
by
sir_cello
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You're wrong as well.
The issue isn't with the programming language _per se_. Obviously some programming languages are more dangerous then others. Obviously some programmers are worse than others.
The issue is with secure and contained execution environments. Properly "jailing" software (whether a process in an operating system, or a thread and window box on a preview pane in Outlook) is the real answer. Engineering has long known that compartmentalisation is key to minimising risk and impact. Operating systems are getting better at doing it. Programming languages are gradually working towards it.
You can have all of the aforementioned and current problems with buffer overflows, language defects, etc: but if the impact is limited (say, to a display pane in Outlook) then the worst that can happen is psychological damage, nothing more. From one point of view, the preview pane should only be doing that: showing me a preview - it shouldn't be granting access to resources around it.
I think that one of the key technologies that Java brought to the computing landscape was the concept of a secure machine (JVM) for a programming language (at a lower granuality than for a monolithic operating system). Argue as much as you like about how succesfull this was (I do remember much debate and technical attention given to it in the early days of Java), but the concept is far more important than the incremental language innovations in Java (i.e. a next-generation SmallTalk or C++).
Give the guy some credit - he's done some very useful technical work - and Java will be one of the technologies in the timeline of the development of computer history. Even if Java itself wasn't succesfull, it's been an interesting experiment and a lot of learning has come out of it.
I recommend this paper as a good read on the bus, just so you can appreciate the technical innovations surrounding the language.
http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_09/column3 ps. It's obvious he's still pulling the Sun line, but what do you expect ? He put a lot of effort and passion into Sun's technical direction - only a fool would think he's going to drop that overnight.
Re:Uhhh
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Maybe he means that if Outlook were written in Java, it would "probably" run in some security model sandbox that would for instance limit its access to the browser cache, which sobig scans for adresses.
Re:Imagine that you are an alcoholic...
by
dspeyer
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There are intermediate steps between C and garbage collection. One I personally like is Cyclone which delivers almost all the power of C and the ability to link directly to C code. There are plans to write a kernel in it, and they look very credible.
For user-land software, things like python are becoming very practical. Java is probably acceptable for daemons and such (so long as they're not massively performance critical) but isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI or where startup time matters.
Re:C moron
by
TheSunborn
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The problem with writing an im client in Java is that an im is something which always is runnig. There the heavy memmory requirement/usage of the java vm is a big problem, because you don't want 10-20MB memmory taken away by the im.
This problem would not be so big if only sun would make a vm which allowed many programs running in the same vm thus sharing the memmory usage.
Martin
Re:Imagine that you are an alcoholic...
by
alext
·
· Score: 2, Informative
[Java] isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI
Better warn those C/C++ developers using Borland's C++BuilderX IDE.
It's written in Java and uses Swing, just as JBuilder has for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Or at least, that's the theory...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The problem with Outlook isn't "C," the problem with outlook is Javascript, VBScript, and Windows Scripting Host, which are PRECISELY the sorts of high-level languages [and their interpreters]
Err no. He's definetly not an idiot (SUN anyone?) and he's not a liar. What he means by this is that as Outook is written in C, buffer over/underruns can happen which is what most viruses exploit (they then proceed to use high level languages such as Javascript etc. to get the email addresses and broadcast spam and viruses). But the primary problem is that oulook has security holes, usually buffer over/underruns. This is not _because_ of C, but what he's saying (and he's mostly right) is that if outlook was written in Java, there would be NO buffer underruns.
that this little terd is advocating.
Or is he just a common liar? I dunno - you be the judge.
Oopps, I have probably been trolled. My bad.
You're wrong as well.
The issue isn't with the programming language _per se_. Obviously some programming languages are more dangerous then others. Obviously some programmers are worse than others.
The issue is with secure and contained execution environments. Properly "jailing" software (whether a process in an operating system, or a thread and window box on a preview pane in Outlook) is the real answer. Engineering has long known that compartmentalisation is key to minimising risk and impact. Operating systems are getting better at doing it. Programming languages are gradually working towards it.
You can have all of the aforementioned and current problems with buffer overflows, language defects, etc: but if the impact is limited (say, to a display pane in Outlook) then the worst that can happen is psychological damage, nothing more. From one point of view, the preview pane should only be doing that: showing me a preview - it shouldn't be granting access to resources around it.
I think that one of the key technologies that Java brought to the computing landscape was the concept of a secure machine (JVM) for a programming language (at a lower granuality than for a monolithic operating system). Argue as much as you like about how succesfull this was (I do remember much debate and technical attention given to it in the early days of Java), but the concept is far more important than the incremental language innovations in Java (i.e. a next-generation SmallTalk or C++).
Give the guy some credit - he's done some very useful technical work - and Java will be one of the technologies in the timeline of the development of computer history. Even if Java itself wasn't succesfull, it's been an interesting experiment and a lot of learning has come out of it.
I recommend this paper as a good read on the bus, just so you can appreciate the technical innovations surrounding the language.
http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_09/column3
ps. It's obvious he's still pulling the Sun line, but what do you expect ? He put a lot of effort and passion into Sun's technical direction - only a fool would think he's going to drop that overnight.
Maybe he means that if Outlook were written in Java, it would "probably" run in some security model sandbox that would for instance limit its access to the browser cache, which sobig scans for adresses.
For user-land software, things like python are becoming very practical. Java is probably acceptable for daemons and such (so long as they're not massively performance critical) but isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI or where startup time matters.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
The problem with writing an im client in Java is
that an im is something which always is runnig.
There the heavy memmory requirement/usage of the java vm is a big problem, because you don't want 10-20MB memmory taken away by the im.
This problem would not be so big if only sun would make a vm which allowed many programs running in the same vm thus sharing the memmory usage.
Martin
[Java] isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI
Better warn those C/C++ developers using Borland's C++BuilderX IDE.
It's written in Java and uses Swing, just as JBuilder has for years.