How Much Java in the Linux World?

jg21 writes "Java is 'incredibly heavily used' in the Linux community, according to Sun's James Gosling, one of Java's co-creators. Gosling was debating Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf, IBM's Rod Smith, and others at JavaOne this week about the possible merits of open-sourcing Java vs the market's demand for continuing compatibility. But Behlendorf seemed not to agree. So who was right, how many Slashdotters are also Java users? Is "incredibly heavily used" an overstatement by Gosling, who after all helped create the language and therefore might be biased?"

Comments

Exactly - Java is not about the O/S

[msobkow]

While I do cross-platform C/C++ development as well, when I need to make sure it's cross platform, I use Java.

Portable, standardized language and interfaces are what gives Java it's power. The community process has provided a reasonable pace of new feature integration, and has abandoned a few implementations that weren't really "ready", much as an orphaned code fork would be.

Open sourcing Java would be a mistake. Unless protected by a strong consortium of members (JCP) or by a strong backer who refuses to sell out to any one interest (M$ platform-specific extensions), Java would rapidly fragment into several code forks and become essentially useless.

It may take time to get features in through the JCP, but it also ensures there are no hastily implemented hacks making their way into the system. Quite frankly, the vast majority of OSS projects which don't come from Linus, Apache, Mozilla, or IBM have proven to be an absolutely disgusting mess of poorly and un-documented code. Java's embedded documentation is an elegant solution to the problem of keeping API manuals and source in sync, but it seems most OSS developers still haven't evolved past the "what, you can't read code?" mentality of the teenage "l33t" programming snob.

OSS means no sanity checks on feature creep, portability verification, documentation verification, regression testing, and all the other enterprise-project aspects of development that make it a useful technology. I've lost track of the number of times I've encountered platform-specific hacks in OSS code that weren't properly #ifdef-bracketed, or which just completely incompatible with other O/S implementations.

In short, Java is critical because it is portable and managed. The fact that Linux is supported is important from a rollout standpoint, but the underlying OS is (and should remain) irrelevant.