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."
Java is only one of the languages that completely prevent stuff like buffer overrun exploits etc. In fact, pretty much every single language except C and C++ do.
He is correct, but it's really not all the feasable in the real world. For all the people that say programmers should be grossly ineffecient, and let the newer processors take up the slack, there are thousands of companies that can't get their important programs to run fast enough, even after spending millions on computer hardware... Making everything in Java is only going to make the situation a couple orders of magnitude worse.
If Sun, or someone else, would come along and modify C slightly by removing unsafe functions, and providing alternatives, you could have the best of both, while not having to completely rewrite all the old code.
Joy may not be with Sun...
by
Bloodshot
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...but he's acting like he still is.
This article is one big "Java can solve all the internet's problems" troll. As if Microsoft's problem is because their code is written in C instead of Java. That's ludicrous.
A programming language can't change people's behaviour. Only PEOPLE can change people's behaviour. Bill Joy's obviously a smart guy, but his railing against what he calls "antiquated" languages and his lack of understanding on why programming languages have nothing to do with e-mail viruses being able to spread so easily shows why Sun is no longer in such a position of prominence.
His statement about how he "designed solutions for problems that people didn't yet know they had" either shows a complete lack of understanding of the way NORMAL people use technology or he's started believing his own marketing spin about Java and Sun's other technologies.
It makes me wonder if Joy is leaving Sun because he's bitter that Sun couldn't take down Microsoft and that Java, while a very powerfull programming language that definitely has it's place in certain types of projects, isn't the language of choice for programmers everywhere.
Re:Joy may not be with Sun...
by
AdamBa
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Indeed. Part of the interview is interesting, but the parts about Java and Windows are just market-speak. vi is a great editor, but Joy seems to have turned into a giant tool.
Except that's wrong. Running Hello World involves booting up what is, in effect, an entire operating system (the Java VM, with virtual memory, threading, everything, the works).
Ok, here's an experiment:
a) run Hello World in Java
b) run Hello World in C (including booting up Linux)
Which one is faster?:-)
--
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
Idiot or Liar?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know.
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] that this little terd is advocating.
Or is he just a common liar? I dunno - you be the judge.
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.
But I'd feel more respect for his comments if he hadn't said
>so many companies use Microsoft Outlook for reading e-mail. Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know. As soon as your company starts using Outlook, you can see
Outlook's scriptability has nothing to do with its being written in C++.
Outlook's UI for attachment handling has nothing to do with its being written in C++.
Outlook's historical willingness to do dangerous things driven by HTML code in the preview pane has nothing to so with its being written in C++.
The problems Joy mentioned, of email forwarding itself to everyone in the address book, are not accidental buffer overflows. They're the malicious use of features intentionally designed into the program.
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.
Or at least, that's the theory...
-- UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Rant continued...
by
pVoid
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
if you're running a monoculture of software--duh, this is not good. People have studied how to make software systems more reliable by running three distinctly diverse implementations at the same time and then comparing the results. That's what they used to do in the space program, when not only were redundant systems built for, say, guidance, but each of them also ran on different computers with different software.
Who here runs their hosted sites on two round-robined boxes with distinct kernels and Apache versions?
Nature deals with breakdowns in a complex system with evolution, and a very important part of evolution is the extinction of particular species. It's a sort of backtracking mechanism that corrects an evolutionary mistake. The Internet is an ecology, so if you build a species on it that is vulnerable to a certain pathogen, it can very well undergo extinction. By the way, the species that go extinct tend to have limited genetic diversity.
Are you implying that Microsoft Windows is vulnerable to extinction precisely because it is so dominant?
He, and the article writer, are playing the circle-j*rk game by feeding each other soft-balls...
But the analogy is poorly 'implemented' at best. If anything, Microsoft's culture could be compared to a termite infestation (revel you little zealots - I've just insulted microsoft), but in no case is it actually on the road to extinction. Extinction right now is a bad looming shadow for *BSD and BeOS and OS/2 etc...
Why is the analogy broken? Because the oxygen and glucose of software is money. Not electricity and bandwidth as some might believe. These aren't real life forms, as such your model isn't bound by the same rules. Microsoft is actually from a market perspective WAAAAY more genetically diverse (it's spreading its market investment at an incredible rate) than any other software company out there. If anything, the slashdot people have figured it out: they are like the borg right now, assimilating any genetic makeup they can.
His analogy is fucking broken.
Fuck this shit, I've flipped the bozo bit on this guy...
Re:Rant continued...
by
kurosawdust
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Bonus points for using the word "fuck" twice and "shit" once, but being thoughtful enough to ambiguously asterisk out the 'e' in "circle-jerk".
Imagine that you are an alcoholic...
by
emil
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...and that, after some real calamity in your life, you have decided to go cold turkey.
Now, where would you rather go cold turkey? Locked in a liquor store, or locked somewhere free of alcohol?
A C compiler is the liquor store of systems programming. It reinforces all the bad habits and rewards none of the good.
C has no formal definition for exceptions (signals can't really count), it does not force good behavior in allocating memory/objects from the heap, the stdio library is slow because of multiple buffer copies (David Korn replaced it with sfio in ksh93), C is constantly beaten by Fortran in computation-intensive applications, Python has shown that C sylistically leaves much to be desired, and this is only the beginning of the criticism.
I like C a lot too, but ultimately, there is no future in it beyond low-level applications that need to work at a near-assembler level.
Can you really imagine C being used for systems work in 50 years?
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.
Java : C :: Emacs : vi
by
achurch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Am I the only one getting tired of the "my language is better than your language" holy wars? Yes, Java can do some things by default that C can't, by default--buffer overflow checks, for example--but that doesn't make it necessarily "better". One could argue that Java's way of checking everything for you makes programmers lazy, and more likely to make mistakes that Java can't catch--cross-scripting holes, for example.
In the end, an experienced C programmer can get the same job done with the same quality in C as an experienced Java program can in Java, and that ought to be good enough for anybody.
Re:Java : C :: Emacs : vi
by
jemfinch
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In the end, an experienced C programmer can get the same job done with the same quality in C as an experienced Java program can in Java, and that ought to be good enough for anybody.
This simply isn't the case.
Studies have shown (if you're interested, the relevant studies are referenced in "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell) that programmers are capable of writing approximately the same number of lines of code per unit of time in whatever language they program in. Whether it's C, Java, or Sparc Assembler, they'll write pretty much the same number of lines of code in day.
The catch, however, is the expressivity of the languages used. A thousand lines of C will certainly "do more" than the same number of lines of Sparc assembler. Likewise (though arguably not on the same scale), a thousand lines of Java will certainly "do more" than the same number of lines of C. So disregarding errors for the moment, programmers are more productive in a higher level language like Java than they are in C or Sparc assembler.
Now, as far as errors go: it's true that experienced programmers (in whatever language) will make fewer mistakes than less experienced programmers. But they're still human, and even if you're Donald Knuth himself, you're still going to make mistakes. The fact is that mistakes in C are far more costly than mistakes in Java. You can have off-by-one errors in both languages. In Java, however, your program will raise an out of bounds exception and, at worst, halt. In C, such a mistake could easily lead to a buffer overflow security flaw that can be exploited for elevated privilege. The same error in C and in Java is far more costly in C than in Java.
With even higher level languages, entire classes of mistakes cannot even exist, but I don't have time to go into the advantages of such languages like SML or Haskell.
Programmers no matter how experienced, are going to make mistakes. What matters is how costly those mistakes are. And they cost a whole lot more in C than in Java.
Re:Java : C :: Emacs : vi
by
Raffaello
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The whole Turing completeness argument is a straw man. If it were really true, we'd all still be coding individual 1s and 0s, since, after all, "You can do the same thing in one language that you can in any other."
The real issue is which language is more expressive. Since I can accomplish any task with any of the dozens of Turing complete languages, which language lets me accomplish the task at hand in the fewest lines of code?
The answer may vary from task to task, but if the task includes the requirement that the finished product be secure, then C loses, because it doesn't protect against one of the most common sorts of attack at the language level, buffer overruns. Common Lisp and Java do. To have this same sort of protection in C, I'd have to write all the additional lines necessary to implement my own runtime to prevent direct access to memory. Hey! I've just re-implemented *part* of Common Lisp, or *part* of Java.
Thus we come to Greenspun's 10th law of programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
You wrote: "Oh well, I guess that's what makes people so interesting. The plethora of personalities. Doesn't mean he's right, though." Bill Joy's opinion that C is a really dangerous language isn't a quirk of his personality. It's an evaluation based on decades of experience as a pioneer in the computer industry, and a deep understanding of the fact that different languages really are better or worse.
Classic Bill Joy
by
Timesprout
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Some wonderful conceptualisations and insights into technology closely followed by statements that make you wonder if Bill is actually in the same universe as us, nevermind on the same planet.
Anyway thanks for Java, its a fantastic development language, please stop telling us we are going to have/need JINI in every toaster, lightfitting and piece of cutlery we own and best of luck for the future.
-- Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth What truth? There is no dupe
One of the other tasks the article metions Joy working on is a long awaited rewrite of vi to include a slick Java Swing GUI interface and the migration away from moded operation to Ctrl key sequences.
According to Joy, "The Control key wasn't available when I wrote vi in the 70's. Back then it was the cent symbol key (you know, that little "c" with the line through it?). So we had to go with this kludgy insert mode thing that just, well, rather sucks."
Bill Joy Outsourced To India
by
Baldrson
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I think they are just side-stepping the real news which is that Sun outsourced Bill Joy. The new Bill Joy is working for 1/10 the rate and lives in Punjab.
[Java] isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI
*shrug*, it works for us.
We've switched almost entirely from Powerbuilder to Java, including writing fairly rich GUIs in it. (I personally think the Java GUIs look and feel better than the PB ones).
The big issue with Java GUIs is that it's almost impossible to do them in a "knock-up" way, (something that VB, PB and the like are good at).
People try it, and then end up with junk and blame it on the tool. It's true that if you want to throw a GUI together as cheaply and easily as possible, then Java isn't the right tool, but if you want to put together a GUI that fits into a well designed system, then swing works just fine.
As Gosling recently said,
"One of the design principles behind Java is that I don't care much about how long it takes to slap together something that kind of works. The real measure is how long it takes to write something solid."
-- Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US has central planning of consumer production
by
Animats
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But it doesn't come from Washington. It comes from Bentonville, Arkansas.
Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, runs about 3300 stores. It's the biggest retailer in the world. It's the biggest employer in the the US. It's four times the size of the #2 retailer (Home Depot). Wal-Mart's total revenue is over $200 billion. This is more than most small countries. And they're still growing.
Wal-Mart controls a bigger economy than Gosplan, the USSR's state planning agency for the civilian sector, ever did. And Wal-Mart's control is far tighter. Wal-Mart has far more computing power than Gosplan ever did. Wal-Mart tracks sales daily; Gosplan seldom did better than obtaining annual numbers. If sales of something go up, manufacturers are told within days to increase production. If sales go down, Wal-Mart pulls the plug on the maker just as quickly. Gosplan could only dream of control like that.
Wal-Mart's "Corridor of Doom" is famous in retailing. That's where you go to sell to Wal-Mart. There's a long hall with buyer's offices, and a waiting room with a pay-per-use coffee machine. Sales reps, and even CEOs, go there and grovel before a polite Wal-Mart buyer who, by tradition, opens with "And what can your company do for Wal-Mart today". The buyer, equipped with data on all of Wal-Mart's suppliers,
then squeezes the sales rep on price. Hard.
Companies that sell to Wal-Mart don't make big margins. If they do, Wal-Mart searches for an alternative supplier, and plays the suppliers off against each other. (That's why they push Linux.)
That's how the American consumer product economy really works today.
Past his expiration date
by
crucini
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Bill Joy is just a typical old programmer full of whimsical opinions. The only reason he's being interviewed by Fortune is that he was in the right place at the right time and is therefore rich. If you read his "six phases" description you see that he basically stopped working in 1987. After that, he just putzed around. I think it's pretty obvious that with Sun in bad financial shape, McNealy finally kicked him out.
Joy comes close to saying Solaris should be re-written in Java. He's not very realistic. When I think of secure programs, I think of qmail, postfix and djbdns. All written in C. I can't even name a Java mailserver or DNS server off the top of my head.
Another reason spam is so bad is that so many companies use Microsoft Outlook for reading e-mail. Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know.
Outlook's numerous viruses are not caused by the program being written in C or C++. They are caused by Outlook's support for active content. The problem would still exist if Outlook were re-written in Java. I wonder if nobody in Joy's circle dares to correct him on this, or if he's been corrected and just didn't hear.
Take any random clever programmer over 30 and give him $100 million. He will wander off into the sunset, murmuring about his brilliant new idea for re-architecting the internet or something. He will never again do or say something relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is only one of the languages that completely prevent stuff like buffer overrun exploits etc. In fact, pretty much every single language except C and C++ do.
He is correct, but it's really not all the feasable in the real world. For all the people that say programmers should be grossly ineffecient, and let the newer processors take up the slack, there are thousands of companies that can't get their important programs to run fast enough, even after spending millions on computer hardware... Making everything in Java is only going to make the situation a couple orders of magnitude worse.
If Sun, or someone else, would come along and modify C slightly by removing unsafe functions, and providing alternatives, you could have the best of both, while not having to completely rewrite all the old code.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
...but he's acting like he still is.
This article is one big "Java can solve all the internet's problems" troll. As if Microsoft's problem is because their code is written in C instead of Java. That's ludicrous.
A programming language can't change people's behaviour. Only PEOPLE can change people's behaviour. Bill Joy's obviously a smart guy, but his railing against what he calls "antiquated" languages and his lack of understanding on why programming languages have nothing to do with e-mail viruses being able to spread so easily shows why Sun is no longer in such a position of prominence.
His statement about how he "designed solutions for problems that people didn't yet know they had" either shows a complete lack of understanding of the way NORMAL people use technology or he's started believing his own marketing spin about Java and Sun's other technologies.
It makes me wonder if Joy is leaving Sun because he's bitter that Sun couldn't take down Microsoft and that Java, while a very powerfull programming language that definitely has it's place in certain types of projects, isn't the language of choice for programmers everywhere.
Bill Joy could join Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune or Pluto.
...)
(Oddly enough, there isn't a company that bears the name of the missing planet you're thinking of
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ok, here's an experiment:
a) run Hello World in Java
b) run Hello World in C (including booting up Linux)
Which one is faster? :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know.
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] that this little terd is advocating.
Or is he just a common liar? I dunno - you be the judge.
But I'd feel more respect for his comments if he hadn't said
>so many companies use Microsoft Outlook for reading e-mail. Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know. As soon as your company starts using Outlook, you can see
Outlook's scriptability has nothing to do with its being written in C++.
Outlook's UI for attachment handling has nothing to do with its being written in C++.
Outlook's historical willingness to do dangerous things driven by HTML code in the preview pane has nothing to so with its being written in C++.
The problems Joy mentioned, of email forwarding itself to everyone in the address book, are not accidental buffer overflows. They're the malicious use of features intentionally designed into the program.
Or at least, that's the theory...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Who here runs their hosted sites on two round-robined boxes with distinct kernels and Apache versions?
Nature deals with breakdowns in a complex system with evolution, and a very important part of evolution is the extinction of particular species. It's a sort of backtracking mechanism that corrects an evolutionary mistake. The Internet is an ecology, so if you build a species on it that is vulnerable to a certain pathogen, it can very well undergo extinction. By the way, the species that go extinct tend to have limited genetic diversity.
Are you implying that Microsoft Windows is vulnerable to extinction precisely because it is so dominant?
He, and the article writer, are playing the circle-j*rk game by feeding each other soft-balls...
But the analogy is poorly 'implemented' at best. If anything, Microsoft's culture could be compared to a termite infestation (revel you little zealots - I've just insulted microsoft), but in no case is it actually on the road to extinction. Extinction right now is a bad looming shadow for *BSD and BeOS and OS/2 etc...
Why is the analogy broken? Because the oxygen and glucose of software is money. Not electricity and bandwidth as some might believe. These aren't real life forms, as such your model isn't bound by the same rules. Microsoft is actually from a market perspective WAAAAY more genetically diverse (it's spreading its market investment at an incredible rate) than any other software company out there. If anything, the slashdot people have figured it out: they are like the borg right now, assimilating any genetic makeup they can.
His analogy is fucking broken.
Fuck this shit, I've flipped the bozo bit on this guy...
...and that, after some real calamity in your life, you have decided to go cold turkey.
Now, where would you rather go cold turkey? Locked in a liquor store, or locked somewhere free of alcohol?
A C compiler is the liquor store of systems programming. It reinforces all the bad habits and rewards none of the good.
C has no formal definition for exceptions (signals can't really count), it does not force good behavior in allocating memory/objects from the heap, the stdio library is slow because of multiple buffer copies (David Korn replaced it with sfio in ksh93), C is constantly beaten by Fortran in computation-intensive applications, Python has shown that C sylistically leaves much to be desired, and this is only the beginning of the criticism.
I like C a lot too, but ultimately, there is no future in it beyond low-level applications that need to work at a near-assembler level.
Can you really imagine C being used for systems work in 50 years?
Am I the only one getting tired of the "my language is better than your language" holy wars? Yes, Java can do some things by default that C can't, by default--buffer overflow checks, for example--but that doesn't make it necessarily "better". One could argue that Java's way of checking everything for you makes programmers lazy, and more likely to make mistakes that Java can't catch--cross-scripting holes, for example.
In the end, an experienced C programmer can get the same job done with the same quality in C as an experienced Java program can in Java, and that ought to be good enough for anybody.
Some wonderful conceptualisations and insights into technology closely followed by statements that make you wonder if Bill is actually in the same universe as us, nevermind on the same planet.
Anyway thanks for Java, its a fantastic development language, please stop telling us we are going to have/need JINI in every toaster, lightfitting and piece of cutlery we own and best of luck for the future.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
One of the other tasks the article metions Joy working on is a long awaited rewrite of vi to include a slick Java Swing GUI interface and the migration away from moded operation to Ctrl key sequences.
According to Joy, "The Control key wasn't available when I wrote vi in the 70's. Back then it was the cent symbol key (you know, that little "c" with the line through it?). So we had to go with this kludgy insert mode thing that just, well, rather sucks."
I think they are just side-stepping the real news which is that Sun outsourced Bill Joy. The new Bill Joy is working for 1/10 the rate and lives in Punjab.
Seastead this.
*shrug*, it works for us.
We've switched almost entirely from Powerbuilder to Java, including writing fairly rich GUIs in it. (I personally think the Java GUIs look and feel better than the PB ones).
The big issue with Java GUIs is that it's almost impossible to do them in a "knock-up" way, (something that VB, PB and the like are good at).
People try it, and then end up with junk and blame it on the tool. It's true that if you want to throw a GUI together as cheaply and easily as possible, then Java isn't the right tool, but if you want to put together a GUI that fits into a well designed system, then swing works just fine.
As Gosling recently said,
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, runs about 3300 stores. It's the biggest retailer in the world. It's the biggest employer in the the US. It's four times the size of the #2 retailer (Home Depot). Wal-Mart's total revenue is over $200 billion. This is more than most small countries. And they're still growing.
Wal-Mart controls a bigger economy than Gosplan, the USSR's state planning agency for the civilian sector, ever did. And Wal-Mart's control is far tighter. Wal-Mart has far more computing power than Gosplan ever did. Wal-Mart tracks sales daily; Gosplan seldom did better than obtaining annual numbers. If sales of something go up, manufacturers are told within days to increase production. If sales go down, Wal-Mart pulls the plug on the maker just as quickly. Gosplan could only dream of control like that.
Wal-Mart's "Corridor of Doom" is famous in retailing. That's where you go to sell to Wal-Mart. There's a long hall with buyer's offices, and a waiting room with a pay-per-use coffee machine. Sales reps, and even CEOs, go there and grovel before a polite Wal-Mart buyer who, by tradition, opens with "And what can your company do for Wal-Mart today". The buyer, equipped with data on all of Wal-Mart's suppliers, then squeezes the sales rep on price. Hard. Companies that sell to Wal-Mart don't make big margins. If they do, Wal-Mart searches for an alternative supplier, and plays the suppliers off against each other. (That's why they push Linux.)
That's how the American consumer product economy really works today.
Joy comes close to saying Solaris should be re-written in Java. He's not very realistic. When I think of secure programs, I think of qmail, postfix and djbdns. All written in C. I can't even name a Java mailserver or DNS server off the top of my head.
Outlook's numerous viruses are not caused by the program being written in C or C++. They are caused by Outlook's support for active content. The problem would still exist if Outlook were re-written in Java. I wonder if nobody in Joy's circle dares to correct him on this, or if he's been corrected and just didn't hear.
Take any random clever programmer over 30 and give him $100 million. He will wander off into the sunset, murmuring about his brilliant new idea for re-architecting the internet or something. He will never again do or say something relevant.