Slashdot Mirror
Gosling Returns To The Java Fold
MemRaven writes "In an article on CNet News, James Gosling reveals that he's returning to the Java Tools group at Sun. The article touches briefly on the Eclipse situation as well as some vague statements about what he's doing in the future. Since he's been gone from the Java fold for a while, this might spell some definite changes in how Sun treats its stepchild."
Let's see what Gosling has done:
He created a commercial Emacs clone, which didn't particularly ingratiate him to the open source community.
He created a commercial window system called NeWS and tried to kill X11 with it, but that was a commercial failure, never really worked anyway, and was largely based on other people's technology.
Then he built a simplistic language for programming consumer devices, but that project failed miserably as well. Only when they put it out on the Internet for free, claimed that they were going to make it "open", and promised to create a browser based application delivery platform did it take off--not because there was anything technical novel about it, but because people wanted to believe in browser-based programming (sadly, Sun has pretty much failed to deliver on all of that). Most of the hard work to make Java a success was done by the JIT developers and IBM.
These days, he seems to be porting over code highlighting and some other features from Emacs to NetBeans.
Sorry, but if this is a "personality story", maybe someone can explain to me why I should be excited about it. At Sun, Guy Steele would be my vote for one of the most competent people they have. But Gosling? Why?
there's nothing Sun can do about it. Gosling's comments about a developer perspective says it all. This is why eclipse has gained such a great following. I know from first hand, a large percentage of jakarta developers are strickly using eclipse now. If you ask around, the Tomcat developers for the most part use eclipse. Many other jakarta projects use eclipse exclusively.
Will someone PLEASE tell this genius to add 64-bit array indices to the language? What in the world good is this stupid language on a 64-bit platform?
And yes, WE DO NEED 64 BITS. LIKE YESTERDAY.
Our lab is taking 24-bit Doppler readings [8 byte doubles, 16 byte long doubles] on simultaneous channels at staggering sampling frequencies, and we can generate a 4GB file in the blink of an eye.
Not to mention MPEGs of e.g. The Ten Commandments or Gone with the Wind.
Java IDEs have always taken a butt load of resources. Some of the really only old IDEs without code completion didn't take as much memory, but what is the point of an IDE without code completion?. May as well use vi.
As for Eclipse, it is pretty speedy as long you your have the ram. 512 is really the minimum on a Win2k + Eclipse box. (200M for Win2k + 100M for eclipse + extra for everything else). From what I've seen Eclipse isn't overly ram hungry for a moderen IDE. It seems to use slightly less memory then IntelliJ Idea, which is Currently at 150M on my box, even though it says it is only using 95M.
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
If you run into this limit you obviously need to subdevide the workload. Make multiple array's to fill the data with.
Go grab a random DVD from Blockbuster. There's a real good chance you'll immediately encounter files of size greater than 4GB.
As I mentioned above, in the medical imaging field, we generate files greater than 4GB in the blink of an eye.
In this day and age, there is simply no excuse whatsoever for any aspect of an "Enterprise" system to lack true 64-bit support. Yes, 32-bit support is nice for backwards compatibility [thank you, AMD], but it's just insane that we don't have a plethora of 64-bit programming languages.
It's like we're stuck in the dark ages, circa 1994.
Before I upgraded my laptop, I use to use an old laptop with 256Mb of ram. Have you even tried eclipse for more than a second? Hands down, eclipse is one of the fastest java IDE's. I'm still using eclipse on my old 450mhz P3 system and it is responsive. Of course the system has 512mb of ram. Java IDE's are memory hungry. People should know better to confuse disk cache related slowness with application slowness. I actually upgraded my laptop because installing .NET and IIS made my system crawl. Those who think the latest VS.NET is great are right and wrong. It's great if you have 512mb of ram or more. If you don't it's worse than eclipse, because it loads a ton of libraries and eats up a huge amount of memory. In both cases, the disk caching is what kills performance. It's not that VS.NET or eclipse is slow. They're just memory hogs.
Except that it's a monster, jaw-dropping, astounding flaw.
The Java Language Specification explicity states that using longs as an array index is an error. There might be a good reason for this, as there were 64-bit CPUs around when Java was being developed.
Also, when an array gets to a point of literally being 4,000,000,000 elements long, perhaps the application really could use some re-work. What applications need such large one-dimensional structures, anyway? Now that I think about it, it would be pretty easy to create larger arrays, anyway, in the way UNIX inodes allow indirection to access terabytes of data. The performance penalty of the indirection isn't huge.
I thought "Java" was supposed to be write-once, run any-damned-where you please.
It is. However, when you move forward to 64-bit address spaces--and use them--it makes going back to 32-bit a little difficult.
And you guys think Redmond's marketing department lies out their [collective] ass...
Actually, Sun is pretty straight-forward about Java. Usually, the lies come out of the mouths of the people who want to believe them.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Subject says it all really, but 1.5 contains some substantial additions to the language, some much needed library additions, and in general is full of goodies:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/index.jsp
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
My own findings have been that VS.NET and Eclipse perform about the same. They both are snappy for a while. They they go off on some tangent and the GUI doesn't respond. If you wait long enough, all your keystrokes and mouse clicks will catch up and the GUI is responsive again, for a while.