"Father of Java" Resigns From Sun/Oracle

Thrashing Rage writes "James Gosling has confirmed he is leaving Sun/Oracle: 'Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St. Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.'"

Comments

One of Many

[WrongSizeGlass]

Several of the biggest names at Sun have departed since the Oracle merger. The memories of Sun are fading fast. IBM probably would have been a better suitor for Sun than Oracle, but now it's all over but the crying.

Re:One of Many

[binarylarry]

My bet is he'll be at Google before the end of the year.

Re:One of Many

[ls671]

> IBM probably would have been a better suitor

This is interesting and I am tempted to agree.

Of course Sun avoiding becoming bankrupt by some other financing means would have been preferable but faced with a buy-out, I think I would have preferred IBM too.

So my question to /. is this:

Are you and I the only ones who think IBM would have been better ?

Second corollary question, since my judgment might be altered by my own perception of both companies :

Am I the only one perceiving Oracle as more, so to speak, "evil" than IBM ?

Re:One of Many

[KiwiSurfer]

I agree on all counts, would have preferred IBM over Oracle.

Re:One of Many

[Taco Cowboy]

Several of the biggest names at Sun have departed since the Oracle merger.

Whenever there is a merger / acquisition taking place, there bound to be some key personnels leaving.

This is normal, very normal, nothing to cry over.

And key techies leave their jobs all the time. It happens to Linus, to Alan Cox and to many others.

They always seem to find other exciting things to do later. :)

Re:One of Many

[Omnifarious]

I think IBM would've been better too. It's too bad they wanted to lowball on their offer and missed their chance.

And, yes, I think Oracle is more "evil". I think this is for several reasons:

1. Oracle hasn't really truly found a way to live with Open Source yet and their core database business is under threat by Open Source solutions.
2. Oracle still makes their money on software. Making money by selling people extremely expensive software licenses only really works if you can get various kinds of locks and holds on them, if you can control their behavior. You can sell them consulting, support and hardware all day without needing any kind of lock, but not software.
3. Oracle has very little real in-house innovation to speak of. The most innovative things I know of happening at Oracle is btrfs, and that's only really happening at Oracle because the main people who work on it are there.
4. Oracle thinks it can kill an Open Source competitor by buying it or the technologies it relies on.

All of those things contrast with IBM. IBM makes its money on hardware and consulting, they've mostly learned to live with Open Source (patent threats not withstanding), and there is some real innovation that happens there from time to time. And I think IBM would be smarter than to think they could really kill an Open Source project by buying it.

Re:One of Many

[fm6]

IBM wouldn't have been any friendlier to the recent departures. The various Open Source people that Oracle fired were attached to projects that just didn't make sense for Sun. And Gosling hasn't played a major role in Java development for years.

Anyway, recent departures are nothing compared to the folks who've been abandoning ship for the last 5 years. A huge number of key Java people (most notably Josh Bloch, who really had more to do with the Java APIs in their current form than any one person) have moved to Google. Others left Sun because they couldn't live with the idea of Java going open source.

But the most emblematic departure, was Andy Bechtolsheim. He pretty much invented the company: Sun exists because he couldn't find an existing company that wanted to license his hardware designs. Then he left because he couldn't convince anybody that Sun needed to be less SPARC-dependent. A decade later, Sun bought up a company he had founded just to get access to the really cool x64 servers he had designed. (I worked on the documentation for one of them.) They made a big thing about getting back "Badge Number 1", but once again, they managed to drive him away. Officially he never left, but his role is so reduced, it's conspicuously a face-saving thing.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun's product line was entirely redundant to IBM - 100% of it would have been put into legacy mode and the users would have been pushed onto IBM products. At least with Oracle, the core bits of Solaris/Sparc will survive in some capacity.

Furthermore, IBM would surely fuck up Java with endless "enterprise" bloated retardation.

I suppose IBM have been a better suitor for the typical slashbot LAMP tard who only cares about downloading a free copy of MySQL, but it would have sucked for anyone actually using Sun technology.

Re:One of Many

[coredog64]

You're looking at this through the rose-tinted glasses of what might have been. Another poster downthread has already mentioned the 100% overlap in the Sun and IBM product lines. I'm not thrilled at some of the things that have played out so far, but I have a hard time seeing how it could have gone any better if IBM bought them out.

Re:One of Many

[ls671]

Hey thanks ;-)

A little rude but I enjoy arguments, not only in my methods ;-))

I also like playing the devil's advocate.

This is becoming interesting, let's wait a little bit and see what others have to say.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect what happened was that Scott McNealy was pretty depressed about the whole matter of handing over his life's work, and the IBM executives he was negotiating with were.... bureaucratic IBM executives, obsessed with legal and accounting minituae. At one of those boring meetings McNealy probably decided that at least Larry Ellison was an impressive guy, a man's man and committed amateur athlete like McNealy (sailing instead of hockey and golf), so McNealy would get one last kick by telling the Armonk crowd to go f***.

And that's how Oracle got a hold of Java.

Re:One of Many

[sheehaje]

Funny thing is, we were just getting ready to order Sun 7310 and 7210 Unified Storage systems, and backed down and went with Equallogic PS6500x and PS6500e's at the last minute instead... We did a lot of research on both, and the one thing that was selling us on the Sun was the open architecture. Well, Oracle has made some moves lately that had us worried on the future of Sun. As much as the Sun had the "cool" factor, we felt more comfortable going with the Equallogic in the end. It's also has us looking away from the Sunfire line of servers.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope - IBM would have outsourced nearly all of Sun to India in the first 90 days.

Re:One of Many

[poor_boi]

IBM would have absolutely been a better steward for Java. They have a controlling interest in the world's most popular Java IDE: Eclipse. And they have better ties with the open source community. And they are a generalist technology company, like Sun was. Oracle tends to specialize. But at the end of the day, too much of Sun's holdings overlapped with IBM's. IBM has their own JEE platform. They have their own hardware divisions. They even have their own Java world-class Java compiler: JDT. And they built their own JVM in Jikes. IBM would have been a better steward of Java. But Oracle had much more to gain from Sun than IBM did, and that's why they were able to offer a better deal to Sun when the chips fell.

Re:One of Many

[ls671]

> You're looking at this through the rose-tinted glasses

I couldn't agree more with you but it is sometimes enjoyable to speculate. Who knows ? It might help us taking action in events that haven't occurred yet instead of proposing an alternate path for past events.

I re-read my posts and I thought I stated this but I haven't:
"Of course all our speculations won't change the path that our realty took."

In short, it remains interesting thing to play the "what if" game in order to enhance our skills. Of course, people exclusively playing the "what if" game without porting the experience to actual decision making will remain perpetual losers. ;-)

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

But the most emblematic departure, was Andy Bechtolsheim. He pretty much invented the company: Sun exists because he couldn't find an existing company that wanted to license his hardware designs.

And how many other companies are out there that really do design and ship a product? Andy has had to basically create his own companies to do the stuff he wants--and once he proves that his ideas are dumb they're snapped up by larger players. Not many players do the whole stack anymore and Sun and Andy are a good fit for each other. Most companies are doing software nowadays, and Andy is a hardware / systems guy.

He's a smart person who can basicly can write his own ticket, and he really doesn't need the money: he's the first person Larry and Sergey got money from, and when out wrote the cheque out to "Google, Inc." for $100,000, they had to actually had to go out an fill out the paper work to incorporate so they could cash it--Google literally didn't exist when Andy invested in their idea.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that way. Bill Joy left long before the merger, but a lot have left after the merger. I know Oracle *WAS NOT HAPPY* when IBM scooped up Rational. I took an Oracle DBA course 8 years ago, and they were talking Rational up a lot. But that was before the IBM acquisition. For database design, a lot of people, ...A LOT... used rational as part of the process. I can't say whether Java would have been "IBM-ified", you know, put in a dozen new archaic commands, put on a really really crappy user interface, port it to the mainframe, and call it good. It could be that IBM just mostly leave Java alone, and support it in much the same way Sun did (probably most likely), but it seems Oracle tried to muck about with Java. Fortunately Java was made open prior to Sunset, as was MySQL, otherwise they would either share the same coffin, or the new per-processor enterprise-only licence prices would make even Fortune-10 CXO's blink twice, roll their eyes and mutter 'damn!'

Re:One of Many

[ChunderDownunder]

Oracle and IBM ruthlessly compete in similar markets, so it's hardly fair. DB2 and Websphere are open source? IBM consultants are hardly going to recommend mysql and jboss when they could sell you their own solutions. Single vendor lock-in is just as bad!

Oh and Oracle's core DB business? Hmmm, I could have sworn they'd moved beyond that, strategically acquiring Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA and now Sun in recent years - employing an army of consultants to compete with IBM's.

Re:One of Many

[ls671]

quoted from my own previous post:
> I re-read my posts and I thought I stated this but I haven't:
> "Of course all our speculations won't change the path that our
> realty took."

I knew I must have done it, I posted on a top level post before replying to this thread and it sounds like what I was saying.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1613862&cid=31804364&art_pos=5

Re:One of Many

[X0563511]

Fortunate for us Sun put Java in GPL for us. Oracle can't "undo" that.

Re:One of Many

[Short Circuit]

(most notably Josh Bloch, who really had more to do with the Java APIs in their current form than any one person)

You mean Josh Bloch is to Java APIs what Alan Smithee is to films?

(I'm sorry; I have nothing against Java, but your sentence was just too funny to pass up.)

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, IBM would have been a much better suitor that Oracle. Oracle seems to have become a bottom feeder insisting upon ever increasing software and maintenance costs, while providing very little in terms of new features or desirable functionality. Most of their new stuff seems specifically designed into locking you into their platform.

IBM at least (though expensive), is a service provider that will help in solving business problems without a great deal of concern over the products used to solve those problems. This is the market that I see development tools flourishing in...

Re:One of Many

[fm6]

I don't mind you making fun of me, but that joke is really lame!

Re:One of Many

[DesScorp]

"Am I the only one perceiving Oracle as more, so to speak, "evil" than IBM ?"

You're not alone, but that just means that you're not alone in being wrong. First, define "evil" in a company? Unless you're producing Zyklon B for Nazis or something, "good" and "evil" for a company is a rather useless term, because it depends completely on perception. What makes a company good or bad? Personally I'd say that a good company is one that makes money, keeps growing, and keeps its investors happy. If they do all those things, then likely they're also providing jobs and being a productive part of the economy.

Others define "good" differently, but if you're looking to a company as a moral center, I'd say you're going to be disappointed. Google's whole thing was "don't be evil", but in many respects, they've violated that according to the denizens of Slashdot. If you want good and evil, go to church or go crusade for something.

As for IBM being "less evil" than Oracle... no. They've just done a better job of massaging the PR machine. They're another company. That's pretty much the size of it.

Re:One of Many

[Short Circuit]

Only us loners enjoy making groaners. ;)

Re:One of Many

[ls671]

Very good point !

I was just thinking about this very fact. I was wondering if Sun was realizing the ship was slowly sinking and that that they made that move on purpose in order to assure that Java would live.

If so, they were really smart and kind.

I hear at some point, Sun had the highest concentration of smart people in its ranks compared to other entities in the same field. Of course, given my own perception, the smartness of the people has got nothing to do with economy which is basically based on perpetual growth for which the world should began to realize by now that it is impossible to achieve after a breaking point which we may or are soon to have reached occurs.

Re:One of Many

[samkass]

Oracle still makes their money on software. Making money by selling people extremely expensive software licenses only really works if you can get various kinds of locks and holds on them, if you can control their behavior. You can sell them consulting, support and hardware all day without needing any kind of lock, but not software.

It's funny, I have exactly the opposite opinion about software business models. My view of Linux is that the business plan is to find the most obtuse, difficult to maintain, esoteric software stack in the industry today, give it away for free, then charge for support. Companies like Apple would rather just charge you a higher price up front for something that actually works well and needs little maintenance or consulting. I think Oracle falls somewhere in-between.

Re:One of Many

[Mad Merlin]

Furthermore, IBM would surely fuck up Java with endless "enterprise" bloated retardation.

Continuing the Java tradition, you mean?

Re:One of Many

[flonker]

Yes it can. They own the name. They own most of the market share. They can roll out a new version that is broken in some regards towards the old version, and boom. Java as we know it is dead. Basically, embrace and extend, but with their own tech, so they would have an easier time of it. Why they would want to is the question to ask, and I don't trust Oracle very much.

Re:One of Many

[nabsltd]

Personally I'd say that a good company is one that makes money, keeps growing, and keeps its investors happy. If they do all those things, then likely they're also providing jobs and being a productive part of the economy.

So would a company that made lots of money and squashed competition leading to fewer and less diverse jobs (and thus less chance for employees to find a better paying job) be "good" or "evil"?

It's a pretty basic part of economics that shows that more employers is better for employees, and usually better for the overall economy, as innovation only tends to happen because of competition.

Re:One of Many

[Vellmont]

find the most obtuse, difficult to maintain, esoteric software stack in the industry today, give it away for free, then charge for support.

You've really miss-categorized the Microsoft software stack in a couple of important ways. First of all, it's not free. Secondly, while they do charge for support, they make most of their money off of people hoping the NEXT version will magically fix all the problems of the last one. You're certainly right about everything else though. It's quite difficult to maintain it, with patches suddenly breaking random parts of the stack in completely random and unexpected ways. It's often times Microsoft's own software that breaks!

Re:One of Many

[ls671]

I used terms as "so to speak" and "perception altered"

"Second corollary question, since my judgment might be altered by my own perception of both companies :

Am I the only one perceiving Oracle as more, so to speak, "evil" than IBM ?"

Please buzz off.

For further enlightenment on the concepts you seem to defend so hard, please see my later post:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1613862&cid=31805100

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Oracle can do with RHEL, Linux, and a lot of other stuff.

The community is free to fork and make their own path. The Java community outside Oracle includes a considerable list of the most powerful companies in the world.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Only us loners enjoy making boners. ;)

There, fixed that for you.

Re:One of Many

[shutdown -p now]

My bet is he'll be at Google before the end of the year.

Either that, or Microsoft (no, really - there are some ex-Java guys there in language design department already).

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

India needs those jobs.

India ranks nr 113 on the global per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ranking by the World Bank.

India have a GDP per capita around USD 2,972.
USA have a GDP per capita around USD 46,716.
EU (combined) have a GDP per capita around USD 32,700.

EU and USA might had some issues lately, but it is still a lot more jobs per citizen and lot more money going around. Education, law, regulations, philosophy, business ethics, and a lot more takes some time to develop.

Re:One of Many

[drolli]

i personally would have found an IBM-Sun deal scary. Much more scary than Oracle-Sun. The results:

-one independent Unix implementation less
-one (important) independent JVM implementation less

Re:One of Many

[Runaway1956]

I dunno. Let's just say that our views are quite different. As a home user without any certifications, I manage to keep my Linux boxes running just fine using free support, available online, and in the documentation. Microsoft boxes cost a good deal of money to keep running. I hear from friends and neighbors and coworkers all the time, that they've taken their machine back to the shop for this, or for that, and forked over another hundred dollars or more.

Add up the costs of the OS license, a decent AV, all the software they purchase, and those unending trips to a shop to have viruses removed, recover lost data, upgrade this or that, and sometimes to reinstall the operating system. And, don't forget that with each trip, the tech/salesrep invariably tries to sell a newer, more powerful computer.

Cost. I'll take the free stuff every time.

So, a kernel update breaks something that I rely on. Big deal, I can roll back the kernel. A driver update breaks something else, I just roll back to the old driver. Yeah, I sometimes use the CLI. I'm not proficient with it, but a quick Google always finds help with whatever. The biggest thing about googling for help, is to use the advanced search, and find RECENT articles and posts about my problem. Trying to use a solution for a similar problem that occured in 2001 is unlikely to work today.

In short, I can build a nice computer for about a thousand bucks, and run everything I've ever needed or wanted to run for absolutely nothing. My neighbors buy computers for $1500 and up to as much as $3000, and they keep forking out money.

To me, it makes no sense.

While Enterprise' costs are multiplied exponentially, their savings are exponentially greater when they use open source. A large organization might spend ten million dollars on Microsoft license - while full Linux support is available for mere hundreds of thousands. And, as time goes by after upgrading to Linus, support becomes less and less of an issue - the enterprise might get away with purchasing minimal support packages "just in case" something serious breaks.

Whatever - I'll be a Linux and Open Source supporter forever. Unless, of course, something markedly better than Linux comes along. Unlikely, but possible. I keep hoping though!

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny no one mentions the best suitor of all: Google.

Re:One of Many

[Ralish]

I'm having a really hard time seeing how any of the reasons you cite are evidence of being "evil" (an extreme categorisation that is bandied about far too much these days):

1. Oracle hasn't really truly found a way to live with Open Source yet and their core database business is under threat by Open Source solutions.

So because Oracle doesn't use your preferred software ideology, they are inherently evil? By this same logic, every company and individual that doesn't release their software under an open-source license is also evil. Stallman might agree with you, I doubt many others will.

2. Oracle still makes their money on software. Making money by selling people extremely expensive software licenses only really works if you can get various kinds of locks and holds on them, if you can control their behavior. You can sell them consulting, support and hardware all day without needing any kind of lock, but not software.

How exactly is making money on software evil? Good software takes a lot of time and effort to create, and if the developer wishes to make people pay for it, I can't fathom how that's even remotely evil. Nasty DRM solutions that treat customers as criminals definitely could fall into the evil category, but you don't provide any evidence that Oracle does this, just a vague assertion that they must because their software is expensive. Even if they do use such DRM, I'm not sure that warrants qualifying an entire company and all who work for it as evil, I bet many of the programmers who work there (and other employees) have exactly the same qualms.

3. Oracle has very little real in-house innovation to speak of. The most innovative things I know of happening at Oracle is btrfs, and that's only really happening at Oracle because the main people who work on it are there.

This may well be true, although I'm not really interested in databases, so I'm not really in a position to comment on any innovations Oracle may or may not have made with their DBMS, as I wouldn't likely be aware of them. But a lack of imagination is evil? Presumably, the bulk of humanity is pure evil for not being blessed with a powerful creative imagination.

4. Oracle thinks it can kill an Open Source competitor by buying it or the technologies it relies on.

This is one explanation for Oracle's buy-up of Sun, but one I don't subscribe to. One, because you'd have to have especially stupid management/executives to believe this is plausible (even by management standards), as the licensing of said open-source technologies is going to go a long way to preclude this possibility. More likely, Sun's assets would go a long way to improving Oracle's competitiveness with IBM; in particular, their hardware and Solaris (Oracle has always integrated well and had great support for the OS). This puts Oracle in a similar position to IBM in that it can now provide the complete system of hardware+OS+database (as IBM does now) instead of just the database and relying on other companies to provide the rest (Oracle Linux not withstanding). I think the notion that Oracle bought Sun to kill MySQL is somewhat wishful thinking, as really, I don't think MySQL is a major competitor to Oracle. Oracle is "big-boys" database technology (which can also be read as "fat and bloated"); primary competitors would include IBM DB2 and MS SQL, primarily in the corporate and government sphere (web companies tend to be more forward thinking and more willing to embrace open-source technology).

Finally, I think you have some fairly naive views on just how friendly IBM is to open-source, in a similar way that many do of Google. IBM is pro-OSS when it is convenient to do so (that is, will likely boost their profits). Their hardware is not open-source (no surprise, no-one makes their hardware open-source except a few niche vendors), but neither is AIX, DB2, or any number of other expensive software technologies they market. The

Re:One of Many

[Nikker]

I'm just curious on how you can say one mega-corporation is some how inherently "nicer" or "less evil" then another? None of them would listen to you unless you were lined up behind thousands of others with a hundred dollar bill in your hand. Even then they would still take your money and try to low ball the return.

In the end the quote I feel works the best,
"...One day the snake bit her on the cheek. As she lay dying, she asked the snake, "Why have you done this to me?" And the snake answered, "Look, bitch, you knew I was a snake."--Natural Born Killers

Re:One of Many

[daveofnf]

I'm disapointed that someone could have such a low opinion of Linux. “obtuse, difficult to maintain, esoteric software stack”... ouch. I don't want to start some flame war or anything but I don't think you understand the history of Linux.

As for Apple, well I have seen plenty of their products die while my Linux based machines keep going for years.

“Companies like Apple would rather just charge you a higher price up front for something that actually works well and needs little maintenance or consulting. I think Oracle falls somewhere in-between.”

The first problem here is that Apple would RATHER charge you every time you turn on their product, but the market just won't accept that. You talk about the “Linux” business model, there is no such thing. You say obtuse, the whole idea behind Linux is that you can use it for whatever you want. If it doesn't work for you, learn how to make it work, learn to program.

It's my view that you don't have to abondon an idea just because it doesn't fit into some business plan. If there's something you need done, how about learning how to make what you want. Companines that support open source understand that they can take advantage of this great body of work and the cost is contributing to the body of work. The money comes when you support those who do not understand how to make things work for them and don't have the option of figuring it out for themselves.

I just hope Java doesn't dissappear any time soon. I hate to say it, but it really is a good language and I really like programming in it.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those "big names" haven't produced anything useful in years. They've been kept around or hired mainly for PR purposes and because they were protected by friends in higher places. Now that they actually being forced to show what they contribute to the bottom line, they are bailing, hoping for another free check for little work.

Re:One of Many

[Ralish]

So would a company that made lots of money and squashed competition leading to fewer and less diverse jobs (and thus less chance for employees to find a better paying job) be "good" or "evil"?

Um, this is pretty much the dead-on objective of effectively all companies. Make lots of money? Yes. Squash competition? Yes. The more competition, the harder it is to compete, and the less likely your product will be used. Reducing competition by destroying your competitors is an objective of all companies, as by definition, they are a threat to your business. You may not like it (I don't), but that kind of business model and associated ideology is the cornerstone of capitalism. The only real question is do they make lots of money and squash competition legally, by delivering a better product and out-classing their competitors, without violating any applicable laws.

More employers and business diversity is of course a good thing, and there-in comes the delicate balancing act of ensuring the economy remains healthy against the natural tendency of businesses to damage it for selfish material gains. Typically, government regulation is what is used to achieve this, by holding businesses that violate various agreed on "principles" of fair trading and conduct accountable. Which makes the staunch objections of many to any sort of regulation all the more bizarre as rational analysis of the capitalist model would seemingly conclude that some reasonable degree of regulation is in almost everyones interest, possibly excluding the filthy rich at the top of the hierarchy of enormous multinationals. But, that's another debate!

Re:One of Many

[symbolset]

Yes, Andy Bechtolsheim is one of the forgotten geniuses of our time. I think he likes it that way.

He doesn't need anybody to empower him. He could set up a lab in his garage and top engineers from all over the world would come to serve in it for the privilege of sitting by his fire, sharing his vision and building it. It would sell and it would be amazing.

The man needs an agent to put it together for him, to deal with the rabble and the Street so he can focus on his work.

Re:One of Many

[rve]

Furthermore, IBM would surely fuck up Java with endless "enterprise" bloated retardation.

IBM COBOL: 665 reserved words
Java: 50 reserved words

And the original EJB standard was IBM's baby

IBM has a history of really listening to their major customers, and then adding their customers' wishes to the standard. IBM has a lot of major customers.

Re:One of Many

[Macka]

Oracle hasn't really truly found a way to live with Open Source yet

Umm .. Oracle Enterprise Linux, BerkeleyDB, OCFS2, BtrFS and now MySQL. There are a lot of good people doing important Open Source work at Oracle. And while they're not the top performers WRT additions to the Linux kernel, they still make a significant contribution (according to a graph I recently saw at a Red Hat presentation).

Re:One of Many

[ralphdaugherty]

So my question to /. is this:

Are you and I the only ones who think IBM would have been better ?

      It would have been better for IBM, so much better that I doubt it would have cleared anti-trust. They would have just bought Sun for Java, and to eliminate any vestige of Sun server and OS competition. Of course what was released to open source by Sun would still be out there, but would be abandoned by IBM except for MySQL.

      Instead Oracle is now in the postion of out AS/400'ing the AS/400, with built in Oracle instead of DB2 and Oracle / Sun's software stack instead of IBM's. Oracle will try to do that by including the ERP stack they own with the unified Java ERP infrastructure / apps. IBM lost billions trying to do that with the San Francisco project.

      I don't think Oracle will outdo IBM in that OS/400 - I5/OS - Power i / DB2/400, which includes AIX as a subset and Linux partitions, is vastly superior to what Oracle can do with Solaris / Oracle as an OS (from this veteran AS/400 programmer's perspective), but Solaris is no slouch and other OS/400 Oracle now owns best of breed in both hardware and software and network services from top to bottom, including ERP software. Truly breathtakingly unprecedented. It's what Microsoft was also trying to do but only has succeeded at much more limited levels, which would continue unless they are somehow able to obtain SAP.

      All three are hamfisted in their attempt to strangle the customer, and all three not surprisingly are very profitable as a result. I've seen the slashdot posts that consider the possibility of Oracle offering an integrated platform more for furthering Oracle and their ERP sales than ramping up Oracle type pricing for every component in the offering, and the potential in my opinion to offer some compellingly cost effective integrated solutions that will rival the best the AS/400 and its third party ERP offerings had through the years, one of the primary ones, JDE, which Oracle acquired but still supports on the IBM AS/400 iseries.

      Oracle is also in the unique position of enjoying the largesse of Sun's open source offerings while only making moves going forward which are highly profitable. They have significant opportunity to take mind and market share from IBM and Microsoft systems offerings with an integrated competitive system to IBM's systems, but it won't be out of the goodness of their hearts.

      Sun was a unique occurrence. If even Sun was considered evil, and posts here suggested it was, then you will find more, not less, evil going forward. The good that has been done has been done.

  rd

Re:One of Many

[ClosedSource]

Yes I agree. This happens in less well-known companies as well. The buddies of the founder are "untouchable" even when times are lean, but a change in ownership ends the free ride.

I'm not a big fan of Ellison but at least he seems less interested in creating Oracle "fellows" that rest on past achievements.

Re:One of Many

[clarkkent09]

Typically, government regulation is what is used to achieve this, by holding businesses that violate various agreed on "principles" of fair trading and conduct accountable. Which makes the staunch objections of many to any sort of regulation all the more bizarre as rational analysis of the capitalist model would seemingly conclude that some reasonable degree of regulation is in almost everyones interest, possibly excluding the filthy rich at the top of the hierarchy of enormous multinationals.

Presumably what you are talking about when you say that the "natural tendency of business is to damage the economy for selfish material gain" is that, if left unregulated, something like monopolies will tend to naturally establish which will reduce the diversity? That's what people think for some reason, but historically that hasn't been the case. Please supply some real world examples of unregulated market leading to monopolies? Almost all examples of real monopolies have arisen due to the government regulation while unregulated markets actually tend to encourage diversity. Here is a good article on the damage caused by antitrust regulation, by Alan Greenspan http://politicalinquirer.com/2007/12/12/interrupting-the-election-coverage-alan-greenspan-on-antitrust-circa-1961/

Re:One of Many

[frist]

You say obtuse, the whole idea behind Linux is that you can use it for whatever you want. If it doesn't work for you, learn how to make it work, learn to program.

And right there, you have the very definition of obtuse, and why Linux is a terrible solution for the average Joe, unless it is prepackaged and sold as a product (like on a Druid phone where the average user doesn't even know that their phone has an OS). What you are not understanding is that 99.9% of possible users of technology don't want to or can't "learn to program". They just want something that works. Telling the average user to "learn to program" is like a guy who likes to build and fly kit planes telling the average person who travels by air to "just build your own plane".

Re:One of Many

[Ralish]

Alan Greenspan is a particularly amusing choice of individual to cite, considering he publicly admitted only recently that his faith in free market economics as his central ideology had been fundamentally shaken by the recent economic crisis in the US. The relevant segment from Wikipedia would be (all cited, see Alan Greenspan article):

In Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008, Greenspan acknowledged that he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation and stated "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity — myself especially — are in a state of shocked disbelief."[36] Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Waxman said. “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”[64] Greenspan admitted fault[65] in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected.

With respect to your larger reply, I'm not sure that government regulation can necessarily "prevent" monopolies, as the establishment of them tends to be through illegal means, often only that come to light after the monopoly is established. Regulation in that respect has a disciplinary function more than a preventative function. The function being to level the playing field to encourage competition due to the illicit gains made by the incumbent. Providing some real world examples of unregulated markets leading to monopolies is exceptionally difficult, primarily because I'm not aware of any wholly unregulated markets. All economies of any size have regulation, the degree of which differs, but it is all present. The US market is regulated, and is only notable in degree of regulation in comparison to other markets. Your suggestion that the vast majority of monopolies have arisen as a result of regulation is presumably referencing government sanctioned monopolies. While I'd contest that the assertion that "almost all examples" might be an exaggertion, I don't disagree with the premise that excessive regulation can be a very bad thing. There are interesting arguments with respect to the RIAA/MPAA being something of a government sanctioned monopoly with respect to their control of the media industry; as always, balance is key, and I tend to subscribe to the view that regulation is necessary, but must be moderated. Too much will be just as damaging as too little.

My quote of "natural tendency of business is to damage the economy for selfish material gain" references the fact that what's good for the economy isn't often what is good for business. Businesses exist to make a profit, and that core objective often runs contrary to what would be in the interests of the larger economy, and its components (consumers, employers, corporations, etc...). Businesses, like people, are at heart selfish entities, and acts of altruism that benefit the economy but hurt the business (hurt being relative, a profit may still be gained, but not as great a profit as otherwise) tend to be rare. Things such as diversity and competition are good for the economy and (most of) its participants, but not necessarily individual businesses. Competition and diversity don't contribute to profits, they tend to reduce them. That's not some complex reasoning, it's an obvious conclusion when observing the key reason for existence of business.

I'll read your article later tonight, I promise, but I'll need some sedatives first. Ayn Rand tends to offend me, as doe

Re:One of Many

[Antique Geekmeister]

IBM was right to lowball. Sun, as innovative as it was, had become famous for failed technology leadership efforts that drifted into fiscal blackholes. Their Sparc architecture has drifted out of engineering use, their compilers were proprietary and unstable and the first thing to replace on Sun systems, their dalliance with AT&T based UNIX rather than BSD turned into a horrific waste of time in competition with Linux's plethora of tools and ongoing development, and even their attempts at new BIOS technologies were hamstrung by their own incapacity to install new kernels on their own systems. I had to ship back a rack full of those Cobalt servers because _no one_ in Sun support could help me get new kernels on them, and they were unable to let me talk to a real engineer who'd ever actually done it rather than merely someone with a "How-To" guide they couldn't even ship me a text copy of.

Re:One of Many

[EsbenMoseHansen]

C# is very close to Java, especially in spirit, so that does not seem far-fetched at all.

Re:One of Many

[jcr]

Microsoft seriously offended him the last time he went there for an interview. I don't think they'll get another chance.

-jcr

Re:One of Many

[rodgerd]

Most likely. But RedHat are now driving a decent chunk of Java business (making more from JBoss than RHEL these days, I believe).

Re:One of Many

[rodgerd]

They've certainly got a better track record of getting stuff into the mainline kernel than Google, of late, and I'd hope nobody from Ubuntu-land was throwing rocks at them, either...

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope - IBM would have outsourced nearly all of Sun to India in the first 90 days.

But what would they have done with these guys' jobs, I wonder...?

Re:One of Many

[hey]

This seems more likely. You don't quit Oracle to join Microsoft (as others have suggested).

Re:One of Many

[troll8901]

My neighbors buy computers for $1500 and up to as much as $3000, and they keep forking out money.

Do your neighbors have teenagers? I'm following the "computer games" train of thought. Because I had done the similar, buying graphics cards, RAM, hard disks, and so forth.

The biggest thing about googling for help, is to use the advanced search, and find RECENT articles and posts about my problem. ... the enterprise might get away with purchasing minimal support packages "just in case" something serious breaks.

I'm ashamed to admit I had not thought of both of these.

Re:One of Many

[clarkkent09]

I was suggesting that text simply as an example of a well reasoned article on why antitrust regulations tend to produce a variety of negative effects in the economy, including precisely the opposite effects of those intended. It doesn't really matter who the author was, but if you prefer feel free to look around for Friedman or a variety of libertarian thinkers, or any Austrian school economist for more of the same. Btw, I think you are reading way too much into what Greenspan said about a specific case of regulating speculation in derivatives if you think that suddenly he is not any more in favor of a largely laissez faire approach to the economy.

I didn't dispute that businesses are not friends of the free market and they don't have to be. I agree that it is perfectly obvious that they are not, just look at how eager corporations are these days to take free money from the taxpayers, to bribe and lobby politicians into enacting laws that will benefit them or harm their competition in some way etc. In fact, many kinds of regulation that make conducting business more difficult are lobbied for and supported by large corporations since they affects their smaller competitors more than them. I simply draw a different conclusion from this, which is that in a majority of these cases, the real source of the problem is the government regulation, not lack of it. I have not seen any evidence that left to it's own devices (of course I am talking specifically about laws regulating competition in order to "improve" on the free market, such as antitrust laws, not about all laws - I am not in favor of anarchy) free market would produce lasting natural monopolies that choke competition. In fact I am betting that you can't provide a single example - Milton Friedman mentioned De Beers diamond company as the only example he could find.

My point was that if you think that a) free market naturally tends to produce a failure that needs to be artificially corrected and that b) government regulation is obviously the cure that makes things better, you are contradicted by all experience in modern history, which is that the more free the economy of a country is, the more prosperous that country is. Google "index of economic liberty" and it is obvious at a glance that the most prosperous countries in the world are also economically the most free.

Also, I have to say this, when you say that Ayn Rand offends you, without saying why, you risk joining a long list of ignoramuses who don't (can't) offer even the tiniest sliver of a rational argument against her philosophy and therefore seek to satisfy their knee-jerk emotional reaction to certain keywords (such as "selfish") by falling back to name-calling as their last resort.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

How would Sun have become bankrupt? They had enough cash on hand that they could have bought themselves out and taken themselves private.

Re:One of Many

[Haxamanish]

Why would anybody who cannot program (and is not prepared to learn it) want to use a computer?

I cannot chop trees, and as long as I don't want to learn that, I will not touch a chain saw.

Re:One of Many

[Zontar The Mindless]

...Java was made open prior to Sunset, as was MySQL, otherwise they would either share the same coffin, or the new per-processor enterprise-only licence prices would make even Fortune-10 CXO's blink twice, roll their eyes and mutter 'damn!'

The parallel you're attempting to draw here is simply not valid. Timeline check, anyone...?

2000 - MySQL AB begins releasing MySQL under GPL v2.
2008 - MySQL AB is acquired by Sun.

MySQL was available under GPL for years before its acquisition by Sun (or by anybody else, for that matter) was even contemplated. So please don't try to make it sound as though Sun 'liberated' MySQL, because that's not the case at all.

IIRC, Sun started relicensing Java as OSS 4 or 5 years ago, also long before it acquired MySQL AB — or before Sun was itself acquired by Oracle, for that matter.

Perhaps you're tuning in to ancestral memories of what Netscape, Inc. did with their software when they saw the writing on the wall...?

Yes, this is a nice story. (Especially since we got Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, etc. out of the deal.) But it is *nothing* like the MySQL story or the Java story in relation to Sun (and later Oracle). Not even close.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

The memories of Sun are fading fast.

Ah! You could have phrased that as simply "The Sun is fading fast".

Re:One of Many

[Angostura]

"Making money by selling people extremely expensive software licenses only really works if you can get various kinds of locks and holds on them, if you can control their behavior. You can sell them consulting, support and hardware all day without needing any kind of lock, but not software."

Actually it's quite easy to sell people extremely expensive software licenses if your software is extremely good and there is no extremely good alternative. It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide whether this applies in Oracle's case.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

How?
Could you expand a little more? I did google search on it, but couldnt find a link on that.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

As a home user without any certifications, I manage to keep my Linux boxes running just fine using free support, available online, and in the documentation. Microsoft boxes cost a good deal of money to keep running.

machines for personal use are not within the market being talked about

Re:One of Many

[CarpetShark]

I recall this now that GP mentions it. What happened was that he turned up at the interview address, saw that the sign on the building said Microsoft, and left in a rage, screaming something about "time wasters". ;)

Re:One of Many

[halowolf]

Small enterprise certainly don't mind the free stuff. I've lost track of the number of contracts i've had where I basically downloaded everything from the development environment to the server software cause the only money the business wanted to spend was on my rates.

Re:One of Many

[Runaway1956]

The principal will hold. Why pay for both proprietary software and an IT staff, when you can get by with just the IT staff?

Obviously, you don't migrate to OSS overnight, but whether it takes 6 months or 6 years to migrate, it only makes sense. It isn't like *nix lacks database programs, or anything else. Find something that comes close to what you need, have your IT staff modify to suit your needs, and run with it. No more licensing fees, no more forced upgrades, nada.

If Coca Cola can run their own custom software in a distribution center, what's to stop any other company in the world?

Re:One of Many

[Desert_Scarecrow]

The only thing you've proven is that your neighbors are idiots. A Windows machine is so ridiculously easy to run at the user level -- flawlessly -- that it's not even funny. Is it the cheapest option? No. Does it come in a shiny case and cost $400 more than the same hardware in a grey box? No. But to make it sound like Microsoft somehow puts all those viruses on your neighbor's computer is disingenious at best. It's like blaming Chevy for the damage caused to a car in a demolition derby. I've run an MS box to game with for years. I've never once needed to go to the shop, remain virus free just using the basic Antivir client + Spybot S&D (both free), and reboot my computer exactly once a month on Patch Tuesday. Sure, all I do with it is write papers for school and play games, but the cost difference to the user on the desktop is pretty minute.

Re:One of Many

[Runaway1956]

TBH, none of my neighbors are sophisticated enough to maintain a state of the art gaming system. ;^) Most of the people I know just keep spending and spending on recovery fees, and buying new software that is supposed to do this or that, but usually fails to meet expectation.

One guy took a fairly new, fairly powerful computer back to the shop three times for virus infections, then gave up and bought a new machine for about $2100. Just a few months later, he complained that the machine was getting slow, like the old one.

I told him repeatedly that I could fix it for him, but he never brought it to me. What can I say? He prefers to spend his money on a tech who "guarantees" his work, but the guarantee is worthless in reality.

Re:One of Many

[thoughtsatthemoment]

“obtuse, difficult to maintain, esoteric software stack” aka, a command line.

Re:One of Many

[MattBD]

Probably - Google are supposed to use a lot of Java and he wouldn't be the first creator of a programming language to work there, he'd be alongside Guido van Rossum and Ken Thompson. Or IBM use a lot of Java too, so they'll probably be falling over themselves to offer him a job.

Re:One of Many

[Runaway1956]

Oh. Really. My neighbors are idiots. Well, how about my neighbors, worldwide? Symantec, McCaffee and others make tremendous profits at the expense of the idiots. Windows is ridiculously easy to run? Yes, sure it is. To run, but not to secure and maintain. That's why banks have racked up billions of dollars in losses over the past decade, and that's why individuals have also lost huge sums of money to phishers, scammers, and identity theives.

Now, while you brag that your MS box has run for years without a trip to the shop - remember, you're posting on slashdot. Try coming out of your Mama's basement, and look around. Your neighbors are probably no different from my neighbors. How many of your neighbers even KNOW about Spybot S&D? Go on, take a poll. Yeah, you'll have some brighter neighbors who manage quite well. You also have a bunch of less bright tools who download porn, click on email links and attachments, etc ad nauseum, then run to the computer shop when it takes hours to boot up.

Idiots. They walk among us, and they look JUST LIKE US!! Could it be that they ARE US?

And, no, in the long run, that cost difference is not minute. It adds up to tremendous profits for those corporations, small businesses, and individuals who are in the business of "fixing" computers. Not to mention the profits of criminals who rely on MS vulnerabilities to make their living.

Re:One of Many

[Ralish]

My point was that if you think that a) free market naturally tends to produce a failure that needs to be artificially corrected and that b) government regulation is obviously the cure that makes things better...

I don't think there's any economic system, free market or otherwise, that is wholly self-sufficient without any need for external input to (attempt) to ensure the best possible outcome. This is precisely my problem with individuals such as yourself, that are so absolute in their beliefs in the infallability of a given ideology. Essentially, you believe your philosophy is perfect. The world is not black and white, and this extends to economics. Further, your distaste for government regulation is quite obvious, to the extent you're willing to jump to conclusions at the moment of its mention. You suggest that I think that "government regulation is obviously the cure", yet, I specifically stated that excessive government regulation is no better, and may well make things significantly worse. As always, moderation is essential, and staunch devotion to any given ideology, in some attempt to maintain "purity", is simply folly. I don't believe government regulation is the solution, any more than I believe free market economics are the solution, but rather, that together when both used appropriately, they can yield the best possible outcome combined.

you are contradicted by all experience in modern history, which is that the more free the economy of a country is, the more prosperous that country is.

China begs to differ (prosperous and not free), as does the United States (highly free with economic crisis). Further, considering that the entirety of modern history has resulted in regulated economies, unless every single economic system in modern history is a failure in your book, then your assertion is false. Further, extremely deregulated economies (I acknowledge you accept some degree of limited regulation) have yet to my knowledge been implemented in any Western society, at least, not to the extent you'd like, in which case, your preferred system is an unknown quantity. Any assertion as to its historical success is therefore, also invalid.

I looked at the Index of Economic Liberty and it seems somewhat ridiculous. The most prosperous countries right now include the likes of China, which, anyone not living in a cave will tell you is hardly free in any sense, economic or otherwise. The indicators are also, by definition, difficult to accurately quantify, and so I view such studies as only of mild usefulness.

My issue with Ayn Rand is simple, I don't agree with her Objectivist philosophy. I think it is ultimately shallow, and doesn't in any way contribute to any meaningful impetus to better ones-self or the broader humanity. I do not view selfishness as a core principle worth consideration, far less adopting. Further, it amazes me an author of fiction manages to command such respect as a source of inspiration and authority for economics in the real world. Atlas Shrugged, for the record, is not a biography. I could write an essay on my distaste for the philosophy, but this is Slashdot, not a philosophy forum.

The rest of your post is really just a rail against government; you acknowledge the issues of corporations with respect to their own self-interest, yet are wholly pre-occupied with how that relates to government and the influence they attempt to exert on it. This pre-occupation (or fixation if you prefer), results in an inability to realise that corporate corruption extends beyond government, and into the economy itself, negatively impacting other businesses as well as consumers themselves. It's a distinctly Libertarian bent to blame all of society's ills on government, but a wrong one. It's simplistic in analysis, ignoring all the myriad of other societal issues that exist independent of government. In some respects, it's a quick-fix mentality, wishfully identifying a single cause for the woes of a group, and steadfastly advocating its removal, in complete ignorance of the larger, far more complex relations that form modern culture.

Regardless, I don't think either of us are going to change our minds, so I won't be replying any further.

Re:One of Many

[TheRaven64]

I'm disapointed that someone could have such a low opinion of Linux. “obtuse, difficult to maintain, esoteric software stack”.

I don't know, it seems like a pretty common view amongst BSD users...

Re:One of Many

[TheRaven64]

He doesn't need anybody to empower him. He doesn't need anybody to empower him. He could set up a lab in his garage and top engineers from all over the world would come to serve in it for the privilege of sitting by his fire, sharing his vision and building it

Given that he was one of the first investors in Google, and his investment is now worth something in the region of $2bn, I think he can afford a pretty large and well-equipt garage.

Re:One of Many

[TheRaven64]

Outsourced them to China.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

You were making quite lucid arguments, then you revealed yourself to be a zealot, making personal attacks and wild generalizations.

While there are people like you around, Microsoft will always win.

Oh, and guess what? I'm never coming back to this thread to read your reply, but this post will live in YOUR mind for days, because you've made a fool of yourself in public.

Unless of course you're actually a Microsoft shill, in which case Bravo Sir!

Re:One of Many

[chill]

Hmmm...maybe turn that into a TV show. The nerd version of MTV Cribs! Geek Garage!

"And how does the 3000' square foot garage bring in the babes, Andy?"

"Well, over here is the OC-3 connection. I can download porn so fast it'll make your head spin!"

Re:One of Many

[migla]

Very interesting, insightful and informative. Thank you.

I'd just like to disagree with you that people are selfish at heart. People are a very social animal. Some time during our evolution, cooperation has given us means to survive. We've evolved empathy and solidarity. Humans have potential for very bad things, but, at heart, I'd say humans are selfless at heart. For the longest part of our (pre-)history, we've lived in small, pretty egalitarian and peaceful groups, gathering and hunting. We even have the capacity to be kind to total strangers. That's rather remarkable among species on this planet.

(Sure, some laissez fairer could say that if helping others makes you feel good, then even selflessness is selfish. To that one could retort that, "ok, but then there is good and bad kinds of selfishness and if you are not selfless-selfish, but selfish-selfish, then you are all about bad selfishness, monsieur laissez-faire-type.)

Re:One of Many

[Water]

If Coca Cola can run their own custom software in a distribution center, what's to stop any other company in the world?

Cost. Custom in house software is very expensive compared to something off the shelf for a small business. Coca Cola probably has paid millions of dollars in developer costs for custom software. Their developers probably average over $50,000/year so if it takes 1 developer year to write the software that is a $50,000 piece of software. But wait, a company Coca Cola's size won't just send a developer on their merry way to write software for them, they need a project manager, testers, and many meetings to determine how that software should work. They need people in house to provide first level support for the software. Each year they'll find X new features they want. Keeping all of those people on staff to maintain custom software is not cheap.

It isn't like *nix lacks database programs, or anything else. Find something that comes close to what you need, have your IT staff modify to suit your needs, and run with it. No more licensing fees, no more forced upgrades, nada.

Even among some of the most ardent supports of Open Source you'll find people that will tell you, your business may hit a point where it needs Oracle or DB2 or a TerraData system to support what you are doing.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Your view of Linux is that it is the most difficult to maintain an esoteric software stack in the industry today? Have you *looked* at the Windows fragmentation? Maintenance? Wanna talk about patches tuesday? Oh, and I love OS X and I've got two Macs here (a Mini and a MBP) and they're fine machine... But I can't get six months of uptime on these.

Linux *is* much more reliable than anything out there. It's neither esoteric nor obtuse nor difficult to maintain.

Your +4 interesting shows how much the MS fanboyism and paid MS astroturfing can go...

Re:One of Many

[Runaway1956]

Coca Cola's custom software? I never heard the full story, but apparently thier sofware was written by a hobbyist and a couple college dweebs over a summer vacation, then tweaked as time went on. I could have heard a false story, but the last time I was in the warehouse, they still had ancient P1 machines sitting around, with that same old software running on it. They wont' upgrade to WinXP machines, because the software won't run on XP. But, with new technology offered by Sun Virtualbox and others, they may very well make images of those old machines, and put the images onto newer computers. The software meets their needs, so, no reason to abandon it!

I can't address those points you make about DB2 and the rest, so I'll shut up here. ;^)

Re:One of Many

[asaul]

Free software is only as free as your time, or rather, the time your company is paying you for.

You can bet Coca Cola are do not have their own team to support an OS at a coding level, or a database for that matter. Sure they are probably doing their own software applications, but you can bet the infrastructure will be either commercial or commercially supported. The only place I know of that writes and supports their own OS is Google, and even that is a derivative of Linux.

The problem with running in house customisations is you need to support them. The larger the software stack you need, the more people you need to support it. As you start throwing databases and possible operating systems into that mix, the less those dollars are being spent on something useful to the business. The problem is at some point you will have to go to someone who wrote the code for some component, because no-one else understands it, or no-one has the time to find out the ins and outs of modifying it. In a small shop this might be a rare event, and you might only run a small enough set of software you can support it with a small team. But as you scale up, that no longer holds true, if simply for the fact your pool of talent shallows as you hire more people.

At some point, it makes more business sense to say "this is the vendors problem".

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation please? Google couldn't turn up anything obviously related to your comment.

Re:One of Many

[Junta]

While I won't agree that it may have been better for Sun fans for IBM to acquire, realistically speaking, there is a lot of functional overlap between Sun and IBM offerings. Oracle bought capabilities they didn't have. IBM would have just been buying customers. IBM would have had to consider Solaris v. AIX, Sparc v. POWER, MySQL v. DB2. The primary element that would have been interesting would have been Java offerings to beef up their Rational segment, but I suspect Java isn't much of a growth market nowadays, so I'm not sure how much would have been extracted for one, and for another there is an open Java infrastructure that IBM could invest and exploit more cheaply than acquiring Sun.

That said:
-IBM isn't as a whole comfortable with open source. IBM is a very large beast with parts of it making good use of and contributing to open source, and other parts fearing it like the plague and doing whatever it takes to mitigate the efforts of the parts of IBM that do open source. Given, their track record is better than Oracle, but worse than some (though the big ones I can think of are pure software companies).
-IBM may make the most money on services, but second most on software. A lot of those services directly relate to software. IBM loves selling locked in solutions, it's just that they haven't been as successful at that in a long time so few know it.
-I will say that IBM invests more in research than most typical companies. They view patent licensing income as a huge contributor to their bottom line, so innovation is a product worth investment.
-I can't say I've seen IBM takes the approach you laid out, though they do things like threaten patent litigation against the hercules s/390 emulator. If they have patents, they will use them. If they don't have patents, it seems they try to ignore an open source competitor and hopes it goes away.

Re:One of Many

[cheesybagel]

Why not? I know there have been people who quit DEC to join Apple.

Re:One of Many

[cheesybagel]

s/Apple/Microsoft/

seems my brain is slipping...

Re:One of Many

[ScrewMaster]

“obtuse, difficult to maintain, esoteric software stack” aka, a command line.

Expectations. Thirty years ago (geez, has it been that long) I was using Apple ][ machines on a Corvus network to run custom industrial data acquisition and accounting/job costing software. I had no problem whatsoever training people (accountants, a couple of secretaries, some plant workers) to use the stuff. Their expectation was that they were going to have to learn something, and they did, and were surprised that it was nowhere near as difficult as they had assumed it would be. Nevertheless, it's that willingness to learn that is the issue here. People have been trained by a quarter-century's worth of glittering GUIs to believe that computers are really simple gadgets at heart, like toasters, and that they shouldn't need to invest any time in learning anything because that's the job of the magical gnomes that reside inside the box. The problem is, to get the full benefit of any complex bit of technology, you have to be willing to use your head. Anyone can learn a command line, just like anyone can learn to program their VCRs: neither are rocket science, but both require some determination

Of of my coworkers made the comment once that the Mac is for "people who are too stupid to use a computer." There's some truth to that. Probably why I don't like Apple products in general.

Re:One of Many

[itlurksbeneath]

There were people that Microsoft lured away from DEC because MS needed operating system writers for NT. I hear some of the internals of the kernel resemble VMS quite a bit (even some symbols in common).

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has "Complixifixation" desease.
Sun always simplified their solutions. Netbeans vs. Eclipse.
J2EE on Glassfish vs. Websphere.

Re:One of Many

[cjjjer]

Microsoft boxes cost a good deal of money to keep running. I hear from friends and neighbors and coworkers all the time, that they've taken their machine back to the shop for this, or for that, and forked over another hundred dollars or more.

As a home user myself other than the initial cost of the computer I have not "forked" over any extra money to keep my network and it's computers running at all. So this would mean (once again) that it all comes down to administration. Linux by nature is more of a hands on OS, you need to actually read up on how to set it up while Windows you can just keep clicking "next" in a wizard and viola your system is up and running. I am pretty sure your friends and neighbors and coworkers are clueless and that is 75% of the problems with Windows users.

FYI my firewall/vpn/wifi AP/DNS/DHCP is an OpenBSD box so I live on both sides of the tracks.

Re:One of Many

[LinuxIsGarbage]

But you still use furniture, and paper, and buildings.

Re:One of Many

[DaleGlass]

The friendliest interface for people who don't want to learn is not the GUI or the CLI, but the TUI. A full screen text application, like a ncurses app.

It takes over the screen completely. At every point it displays the possible choices. It makes heavy use of keyboard shortcuts so that an experienced operator can be really fast with it. It lacks shortcuts that cause something weird to happen (like the Win key combinations). It processes everything serially, so that it's possible to use several keyboard shortcuts in a row, and have the right thing happen. It does only what it needs to do, and the computer doesn't offer a way to do anything else.

They're still being worked on, and these days they seem to be mostly built on Linux.

Re:One of Many

[atomic777]

This would be interesting if it were true. IBM consultants are quite happy to sell Oracle-based solutions and do so quite often -- the linkages between IBM software, consulting and hardware are really quite loose.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Several of the biggest names at Sun have departed since the Oracle merger. The memories of Sun are fading fast. IBM probably would have been a better suitor for Sun than Oracle, but now it's all over but the crying.

reminds me of DEC when they we're bought by Compaq, there are rumors of DEC engineers literally crying.
well, like the bible and battle star galactica says: all of these has happened before and it will happen again. there's nothing new under the sun.

Re:One of Many

[Haxamanish]

But you still use furniture, and paper, and buildings.

Of course I do. What is your point?

Re:One of Many

[ScrewMaster]

The friendliest interface for people who don't want to learn is not the GUI or the CLI, but the TUI. A full screen text application, like a ncurses app.

You know what? I agree with you a hundred percent. The aforementioned Apple ][ apps were all TUI-based, and the interface was basically a series of nested menus, no more than ten options per menu, with a single-digit shortcut for each option, each option taking you to either an entry/display screen ... or another menu. I noticed that users would come up and just type the numbers that got them to the page they wanted. Linda the cost accountant might type "2934" to get where she need to go, and Sally the secretary might enter "40375" to do what she wanted. After they used the system for a while, none of the regular users bothered using the highlight bar ... they just spit out their memorized combination and BAM!, they were getting their jobs done. Because the screen updates were instantaneous, they could just snap in a few keystrokes in under a second.

It worked well. The software got out of their way, I had no support calls (other than the occasional hardware failure) and, most importantly, I got paid in full. Happy corporate users and paychecks go hand in hand, I discovered.

Re:One of Many

[newdsfornerds]

IBM has long been a self-proclaimed champion of Linux. Despite what the desktop Linux vendors do and say (I'm typing this on a ThinkPad running Ubuntu) Linux has been taking market share from Solaris and the other Unixes rather than from MSFT platforms. How does IBM keep AIX alive and promote Linux while it also pushes Solaris? Q: Does anyone expect Oracle to turn Solaris into an appliance for running Oracle and MySQL only?

Re:One of Many

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actually, Jalphi would have been a much more fitting name, with the recent versions begging to be renamed to Jalphskell.

Re:One of Many

[troll8901]

I told him repeatedly that I could fix it for him, but he never brought it to me.

Sounds like he'd rather endure the pain than start thinking about fixing it once and for all. (The key word is "thinking" - it's a big effort.)

At the same time, we cannot intrude and forcibly fix other people's machines.

Would you consider tempting this guy to switch to a Mac? ;)

Re:One of Many

[Runaway1956]

I would, yes. And, I might even sound convincing in the effort, if I had experience with Mac. The only thing that I am going to sound convincing with, is Linux. ;^)

Re:One of Many

[jvillain]

I don't know if IBM would have been a better home. For the hardware side I am sure they would have. But as to the question of whether Oracle is more evil that IBM? By a long shot.

Re:One of Many

[jvillain]

You make it sound like all proprietary software comes just ready to run which every one with enterprise experience knows is bunk. SAP, People Soft, any thing BMC/SMC etc, etc, etc are hardly plug and play.

Re:One of Many

[Unoti]

Oh and Oracle's core DB business? Hmmm, I could have sworn they'd moved beyond that, strategically acquiring Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA and now Sun in recent years - employing an army of consultants to compete with IBM's.

The Peoplesoft acquisition is to a great extent all about strengthening their position in the database market. They bought Peoplesoft, announced that the Peoplesoft product is pretty much dying, and you should start thinking about converting to Oracle Apps (Oracle's ERP offering built on top of Oracle DB which competes against Peoplesoft). Peoplesoft runs (ran?) on multiple databases-- the user had a choice. Oracle Apps is built almost entirely on PL/SQL stored procedures, and will never, ever run on any other database than Oracle.

Those acquisitions you mentioned (at least the Peoplesoft one, the only one that I have been closely involved with personally) are moves designed to kill serious competition and consolidating the marketplace. It's designed to acquire new customers to lock in. It's not about increasing a portfolio of knowledge and capability.

Re:One of Many

[Shadowruni]

He was given the silly interview questions. You know like, "How many quarters does it take to reach the top of the Empire state building?". He took offense to that being:

1. Who he was

2. What he was

3. He help CREATE A LANGUAGE

I've always hated those questions, not becuase I couldn't answer them, but because they don't show WHAT I KNOW, only how I solve problems. Sure you COULD say that if you know how to solve a problem you can apply it anywhere but in my experience, knowing not only how to solve a problem, but actually creating a viable solution is far more important.

Just my two cents...

Re:One of Many

[ppanon]

Sure. However if you can't find just the furniture or paper or building that meets your needs off-the-shelf, you can still pay someone to produce exactly what you want but you'll have to pay more for a custom solution (or you can pick up a hammer and saw). The thing is that furniture, paper, and buildings are used by a lot of people so there is a lot of variety on the shelf, but when it comes to niche market products, there isn't as much choice.

Re:One of Many

[kanguro]

Gondor doesn't want Java, Gondor doesn't need Java

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, I can build a nice computer for about a thousand bucks, and run everything I've ever needed or wanted to run for absolutely nothing. My neighbors buy computers for $1500 and up to as much as $3000, and they keep forking out money.

That's like a car mechanic shaking his heads when he sees his neighbors bring his car to the garage.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

C# is very close to Java, especially in spirit

C# is nothing like the spirit of Java. Java was meant to be a simple language, a dumbed-down C++. C# is basically C++ with a GC instead of an RAII model, including support for functional programming and templating.

Re:One of Many

[nabsltd]

The only real question is do they make lots of money and squash competition legally, by delivering a better product and out-classing their competitors, without violating any applicable laws.

This is where morality also comes into play for a company.

There are many ways to not break any laws (or at least not in such a way that it can be proven that you broke them) but still do the "wrong" thing. Today, I suspect the #1 thing that companies do that is immoral is to "buy" various elected officials so that it's even easier to compete (since will be far fewer "applicable laws" after a while).

Or, you've got the reverse where a company gets a law created that allows them to keep out competition. Telecommunications in the US is a classic example of how this has hurt the consumer.

Re:One of Many

[wwfarch]

Our solution to this conundrum is to have people solve a simplified version of problems actually relevant to our company. We take real problems we've run across, simplify them, and ask the candidate to come up with and code a solution.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum.. C# is close to java on semantics, not *at all* on spirit.

Java is widely known as a cross-platform language.
C# is even more tied to the native platform it is programmed on as C is (which means, while it is technically possible to write cross-platform programmes in C#, nobody does it except for HELLO WORLD).

Re:One of Many

[clarkkent09]

Regardless, I don't think either of us are going to change our minds, so I won't be replying any further.

That's probably a good idea but I can't resist replying to a couple of points. China is obviously only as successful as they have opened up their economy a few small steps towards the free market and away from central control. I guess they have learned the lessons from famines in their own and other socialist countries and compared it to what their compatriots made of countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore etc which were some of the freest and wealthiest countries in the world during the same period. Even after all that growth China's per capita GDP is around 1/13 that of the USA and less than that of Albania: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita

I happen to think that China's communists are simply postponing the inevitable political collapse by generating temporary growth by offering their proletarian masses as cheap labor for Western capitalist companies, but that will only take them so far. No government in the world has ever figured out how to control something as complex as the economy with anywhere near the efficiency of the free market and China won't either. As for Ayn Rand, all I can say that you completely misunderstand her philosophy and maybe should try reading some of it before you criticize it.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

C# is basically C++ with a GC instead of an RAII model, including support for functional programming and templating.

lolwut? I must have been delusional all these years, most of my C++ code being functional and half templated. So must the millions of other professional C++ programmers since 1998. And RAII can basically be achieved in C#, just a bit more verbosely.

Tip: If you're using C++ and not the Standard C++ Library (including STL), you're not using C++. If you're not using templates, you're using a subset of C++.

Did you mean, C# is basically C++ with a GC instead of an RAII model, and, unlike Java, supports functional programming and templating...?

Re:One of Many

[Viol8]

"they don't show WHAT I KNOW, only how I solve problems"

Exactly , and thats the whole point as you highlighted yourself. No one wants some parrot who can quote appendex A subsection 3.2 from the C++ programming manual or whatever , they want someone who can think. Any idiot can learn a programming language, very few idiots come up with good solutions.

Re:One of Many

[Joseph Lam]

IBM probably would have been a better suitor for Sun than Oracle, but now it's all over but the crying.

If we're talking about only the Java part of Sun then you're probably right. But I think the hardware business of Sun is worth more to Oracle than to IBM.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

While Enterprise' costs are multiplied exponentially, their savings are exponentially greater when they use open source.

Until oracle comes in, buys the parent company and destroys the project. Then their migration costs are massive and things never really 'work right' for years to come.

Re:One of Many

[jcr]

Jealous much?

What did he do, ignore your application to work for him at Sun?

-jcr

Re:One of Many

[daveofnf]

I have recommended many people use Ubuntu 9 and up and they are average Joes. They check their mail, they surf the net, they download and listen to music, and it works beautifully for them. Just because you don't have to pay for something doesn't mean it's not a good solution.

But, if you want to talk about corporations, how many TVs are out there today that have software based on Linux technology? Look at the success of the Eee PC, you think that would have happened in XP? Nokia is still light years ahead of Apple in mobile technology thanks to Linux technology. In fact, if you were in Japan 18 months ago with an iPhone, you would have had the crappiest phone in the country. While I was doing my degree you could get a PS3 from Sony for a summer to do Linux development on it, you think some of that didn't make it into the production system?

I'm not trying to tell people to program, I'm saying that anything you can think of doing or wanting has already been solved at some level. You just don't need to rely on companies to make choices for you. The definition of obtuse is to be narrow minded, to be ridged, to lack insight. It would be obtuse to not open your mind to the possibilities that exist in the open source community. How could Linux be in so many places and be obtuse?

Re:One of Many

[aralin]

Slashdot just became a place for delusional conspiracy theorists. Oracle has nothing to gain by what you suggest and plenty to lose. Almost 2/3 of Oracle developers use Java to write code that Oracle wants to sell. By harming the language in any way Oracle would forgo a very significant investment in people, in products and in their future ability to maintain those products and get paid for support contracts, which are what feeds the company.

I don't understand how nobody can see that IBM could kill Java much more easily than Oracle. In fact, IBM might do it just to harm Oracle if they got their hands on Java. If you watch any of the news about Sun takeover, Larry Ellison clearly says that Java is a key strategic asset for Oracle and there is no reason at all, as far as I know, to doubt that.

Re:One of Many

[dr2chase]

no-one makes their hardware open-source except a few niche vendors

Like my employer.

When you say "niche vendor", I think of the guys who helped design my bicycle.

Re:One of Many

[Hognoxious]

Sounds like he's a bit of a prima donna. Sounds like you are too.

Re:One of Many

[Hognoxious]

What does he do with the old hardware? I wish I knew someone like him, I'd take them off his hands .. umm, for spares...

Re:One of Many

[Hognoxious]

While Enterprise' costs are multiplied exponentially, their savings are exponentially greater when they use open source.

You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you appear to think it does.

Re:One of Many

[Philip_the_physicist]

When you've created a top-10 language, come back and tell us all how clever you are. Java isn't meant to be a theoretically good language, and some of its design decisions I don't like, especially the horrible way you have to pass functions, and the lack of multiple inheritance, but it is popular. The hard research is important, but it is not much use without the people who actually make it into a useful product, and both groups deserve proper recognition for what they do. Certainly, Gosling's work is probably more directly useful to MS or Google than a pure researcher's especially since a researcher is more likely to publish his work openly.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. What the heck does GPL have to do with it?
If Sun put Java under a BSD/Apache/MIT/APSL/CDDL, it'd still be there for the community to work on. Even if Oracle were to change the license, it'd be the same as if it were GPLed, the community would just fork it from the last open one.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Re:One of Many

[X0563511]

What the heck does GPL have to do with it?

Er, because that's what they did! If they had put it under one of those other licenses, then my sentence would work perfectly fine if you substitute GPL for one of them.

What the hell is your problem?

Re:One of Many

[RockDoctor]

My bet is he'll be at Google before the end of the year.

My bet is he'll be at Google before the end of the month.

FTFY

OK, he may want to take more than 3 weeks leave. Next month.

Re:One of Many

[Anonymous Coward]

What did he do

Dude, have you ever used Java?

The final nail in the coffin for Java

[Anonymous Coward]

N/T

Not the best timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking for a job? Get in line, buddy.

Re:Not the best timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he's laughing at that.

All that can be said is that he will be missed, but I’ve no doubt that his contributions (wherever he goes) will continue to innovate the Java, like he has done it in the past. Every company would hunt to hire him and I would love to see Google, IBM (leaders in Java) watching closely on it.

Re:Not the best timing

[timmarhy]

some how i suspect the main developer behind one of the most influentual technologies of the decade isn't going to be standing in line behind you.

here's how it'll go. while you are queing for that entry level position, you'll see managment greeting him at recieption, shaking his hand and then taking him upstairs to talk with the big boys.

Re:Not the best timing

[Nerdfest]

Much like Chuck Norris ... it's not hunting, as that implies the possibility of failure. James Gosling goes job *killing*.

Re:Not the best timing

[NicknamesAreStupid]

In a way, he may have a harder time that you think. At Sun, he could pretty much do as he pleased. There aren't many openings for "do as you please." Google or IBM might actually want him to be "one of the team." Think he still wants to be a "team player?" He might prefer to start his own team. I would.

Re:Not the best timing

[greg1104]

You know how sometimes tech jobs request things like "Java: 15 years experience" that leave you screaming at the HR people that the language wasn't even released until 1996? While you're busy crying about that, James Gosling is going to laugh at you and take that job.

Re:Not the best timing

[Tumbleweed]

You know how sometimes tech jobs request things like "Java: 15 years experience" that leave you screaming at the HR people that the language wasn't even released until 1996? While you're busy crying about that, James Gosling is going to laugh at you and take that job.

Yeah, but the problem with job requests like that are things like they said Java when they really meant JavaScript, and they also want you to be an expert in .Net, databases, Photoshop and Flash, all at the same time. And they pay $18/hr.

Re:Not the best timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the job adverts I see occasionally:

Requirements:
* Embedded C
* MFC
* PHP

I can just see the idea behind it: "We want our software to be on a device, on the PC and on the net."
Shows zero understanding to the way software is written, deployed and maintained, though.

Or maybe it means "we've just lost three of our developers because we're a BS company, and we've already charged the customers for our vapourware".

Re:Not the best timing

[c]

More likely he's going to put "invented Java" on his resume, and HR is going to screen him out because "invented" isn't a number greater than or equal to 15 years.

At least, that's how it works in the federal government...

c.

Re:Not the best timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually IBM "invented" his role. Look up IBM wild duck. At your service.

Re:Not the best timing

[JamesP]

Well, I'm sure he would be a sure fit for those "must have 10+ years Java experience"

or maybe not... HR drones...

Re:Not the best timing

[s0lar]

Learn a little bit of C++?

Job hunting

[wigaloo]

I don't think James is going to be job "hunting"... Unless it is the kind of hunting where you stay at home and accept "applications" from prospective employers.

Re:Job hunting

[Dahamma]

Yup. And it seems these days "Software/Internet Pioneers" have three choices: retire, start a new company, or work at Google.

Re:Job hunting

[wigaloo]

Yup. And it seems these days "Software/Internet Pioneers" have three choices: retire, start a new company, or work at Google.

I wonder if working at IBM is a more likely possibility? The future of Java as a platform is in question. IBM, with a substantial Java activity, could seize the initiative here in hiring the "father of Java".

Re:Job hunting

[daveb]

>I don't think James is going to be job "hunting"... Unless it is the kind of hunting where you
>stay at home and accept "applications" from prospective employers.

Oh he's smart enough to go hunting.

Not the kind of hunting that I would do which would involve hitting up anyone who crosses my path. He will be hunting out the next place which will be a best "fit" for him. If he sits at home waiting for someone to come to him then he might miss out on the wonderful position at a place where people don't think he'd be interested.

You probably mean just that he can take his pick - and he probably can. But I suspect he'll be a bit more proactive than waiting to see who comes to him

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

for Google. Steve Jobs works at Apple, Mr. Gosling would work for Google.

Happy to clear that up for you.

Re:Job hunting

[Dahamma]

IBM wouldn't be unheard of, but probably not near as likely. I'm pretty sure Google is the single largest user of Java in the world today.

Plus, both companies being in Mountain View, his new office would probably be less than a mile from his old one :)

Re:Job hunting

[thoughtsatthemoment]

Who not go to college? Java is a very good language for learning programming.

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs is Apple. Remember what happened the last time he left the Company?

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late.

Re:Job hunting

[terjeber]

With some of the intrinsic problems in Java ironed out. Properties anyone? How about the mess that is Java auto-boxing?

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

But faster, and without the bloat.

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

No, slower with Microsoft ickyness and less security: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=csharp

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Mono is an open sores implementation of C# much slower than the real Microsoft CLR and C# compiler. As none of the open sores people got the skill to make a good JITed virtual machine (Sun JDK became open source but the people who wrote it didn't want it to happen) it isn't fair to compare an implementation created by the open sores people. It's like comparing GCJ to Microsoft CLR.

Re:Job hunting

[ClosedSource]

Gosling is a smart guy, but how does hiring the inventor of Java satisfy any business objective? Has he done any real product development in the last decade?

Re:Job hunting

[ClosedSource]

He crashed and burned?

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, become an instantly tenured professor at an incredible school like CMU, MIT, Edinburgh, Cornell, Cambridge, Stanford, etc...

Re:Job hunting

[spiffmastercow]

So that's why C# has operator overloading, closures, anonymous types, lambda functions, and the pure awesomeness that is LINQ? I don't care too much for Microsoft's business practices, but Java fanboys really need to take a long hard look at the state of their language of choice.

Re:Job hunting

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point, all three were one of the same. Today, the latter means menial labor with a big head on a big star.

based on this can it be inferred

[Anonymous Coward]

...that the Oracle/Sun merger was not good for the goose?

Farewell sir.

[ls671]

Farewell sir,

The reasons why you left are now up to speculations and it could turn out insightful in understanding the direction former Sun products will take.

Maybe he can find work

[Megaweapon]

as a rigger on Ellison's boat.

Re:Maybe he can find work

[Anonymous Coward]

as a rigger on Ellison's boat.

It's a galley? Oh, wait...

Re:Maybe he can find work

[Anonymous Coward]

I really misread your post and at first took it for a GNAA troll.

Re:Maybe he can find work

[should_be_linear]

Actually, he refused rigger job, thats why he is leaving Oracle.

Re:Maybe he can find work

[Anonymous Coward]

as a rigger on Ellison's boat.

I read that as "nigger". Really confusing.

Any ideas why?

[yuhong]

just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.

Any ideas why? And how to fix at least some of them?

Re:Any ideas why?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

He's speaking in code. The translation is "Ellison's lawyers will feed by balls to the dogs if I don't keep quiet".

Re:Any ideas why?

[yuhong]

How and why?

Re:Any ideas why?

[oldhack]

Maybe you're not familiar with these two outfits.

SUN was an engineering company with sales on the side. Oracle is a sales company with software on the side.

Re:Any ideas why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nondisclosure agreements & non-compete clauses.

I'll let you figure the 'why' out on your own.

That, & the fact that most employers don't generally like people who run around publicly trashing their former employer, even if they have fully legitimate reasons to do so. It's just not very professional. Well, unless your job is to trash people and talk shit.

Re:Any ideas why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I really miss www.fuckedcompany.com: it was great fun seeing insider dirt get released there, long before the merger or layoffs were admitted to the lower level staff. It was also a great test of who the mid-level management and VP liars when your own company's internal policies showed up there, first.

Re:Any ideas why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupid store called - apparently they're right out of you.

Re:Any ideas why?

[yuhong]

Nondisclosure agreements & non-compete clauses.

I know, and I can understand sometimes there is real reason such things are needed.

That, & the fact that most employers don't generally like people who run around publicly trashing their former employer, even if they have fully legitimate reasons to do so.

This needs to be fixed, though.

Am I the only one who lol'd at:

[chrisl456]

"just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good"? I'm gonna guess he wasn't a fan of the merger....

An interesting graphic

[oldhack]

This from the blog of Gosling, the man himself:

http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/so_long_old_friend1

If you browse his blog entries, you see the noose was tightening, as was expected. SUN and Oracle may both be in the Valley, but their cultures were radically different.

Another good guys sank...

Re:An interesting graphic

[Anonymous Coward]

From his last regular entry on the blog, last line, reads:

The few more recent blog entries that I did at blogs.sun.com were written under somewhat more strict policies :-)

Translation- he is under some strict non-disclosure agreements, so he has to keep his mouth shut for some period of time. My guess is that he wasn't happy at the direction they announced (internally) and so decided to move on. I'm sure we'll hear more down the road at some point.

Resigned or was fired?

[dkleinsc]

Here's why I ask: not because he's not a smart technologist - he clearly is, and while I don't love everything about Java it was a pretty darn good idea.

However, from a business standpoint Java was basically a disaster, because it required quite a lot of support from Sun while at the same time not giving them something they could sell. To become a standard, they had to give away the basic tools and describe the standard so that other people could make JVMs. Once they did that, there was really nothing that Sun had to sell that its competitors (including open source projects) couldn't build either better or cheaper.

Now, you could make the same criticism of Microsoft's C# language, except that Microsoft always treated its languages as a loss leader for selling MSDN and Windows server licenses. Since Java was specifically cross-platform, it couldn't do the same for Sun.

Re:Resigned or was fired?

[oldhack]

Go to Gosling's blog directly and you would see that he saw changes unrolling not to his liking. People of his rep can roll with the punches and hang around if they wanted. So...

Re:Resigned or was fired?

[greg1104]

Larry Ellison has already stated that he estimates Oracle was making about as much money from Java technology as Sun was. So whether or not the Java business was profitable for Sun, Oracle already knows how to productize it into profit, particularly after their purchase of BEA Weblogic. They paid 8.5B for BEA just to have a leading Java enterprise stack; do you really think they'd have fired Gosling when they consider Java that strategic?

Re:Resigned or was fired?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java wasn't a disaster, it was just Sun making a market for it's technologies, they had tones of servers powering the internet but you and I weren't running SPARC. So to make sure software would still be produced (this is in the days before our "polished" open source OS :-P) for these systems and to enable (closed source) developers running x86 to write code for SPARC they needed a language that had binary compatibility. I suppose they also figured (like Google does with advertising) the more devices they could make internet enabled the more people would be buying their servers to host data on.

It's basically the same as Google working on Ogg Theora, it doesn't actually make them money but it does promote something that does (internet video means internet advertising).

This might of worked if the mass production of PCs didn't mean they could undercut the expensive Sun gear and while still providing the same basic file/web/database hosting service. And it was a bad day for Sun when people worked out a cluster can do many of the things a 64 processor monster can do and at half the price... Basically they thought they were indispensable because their stuff was so much better and, like DEC, they found that the market doesn't actually care about quality.

Re:Resigned or was fired?

[maestroX]

However, from a business standpoint Java was basically a disaster, because it required quite a lot of support from Sun while at the same time not giving them something they could sell. To become a standard, they had to give away the basic tools and describe the standard so that other people could make JVMs.

Pardon?
The compiler market dumped about 10 yrs ago. I remember Java in its first days (1996/97( being regarded as the next best thing -- compilers everywhere (Symantec Café that seemed to produce faster code on a P100 than anything nowadays), open-source in its infancy, Universities adopting java, businesses adopting java, appliances adopting java, embedded JVM hardware, everything JVM (check your latest smartcard).
Applets, etc, java triggered a revolution in the development of the web and computing as it is today -- other than Java, each innovative technology developed at Sun (and there are pretty much) could sustain a healthy company.
The business and management departments wasted this company, lack of vision, lack of leadership, unable to make a gold-laying goose profitable; that's Sun the last 10 years.
To Gosling et al., all the best and good luck!

Not a big deal

[fm6]

When I was at Sun, Gosling had less and less to do with actual work on Java. By the time I left the company, he seemed to be mainly an evangelist. Java was almost entirely his brainchild, of course, but it's been a long time since he contributed to it in any significant way.

Sun had a fair number of people who were paid to do more or less what they wanted. Most of the time I was at Sun, Gosling was more or less in that category. Some of these folks did some really brilliant work, but I'm not sure they really earned the money Sun paid them. That wasn't a big deal when everybody wanted Sun's high-end hardware and there was plenty of money for this sort of thing. Towards the end, though, money got tight, and there were fewer people like that. But even during the last days, I think they really had more Blue Sky People then they could really afford.

Re:Not a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Outsider here. A guy like Gosling or Joy would have so many demands on their time that they wouldn't have any cycles to spare to spearhead development of a hot new API or code up a prototype of a promising new product. Successful new development requires large, contiguous blocks of time for the principal developers.

Re:Not a big deal

[oldhack]

Which group were you in and when?

Re:Not a big deal

[burris]

Look up a guy by the name of Drew Major.

Re:Not a big deal

[fm6]

I did two stints as a contractor, writing docs for the core Java software. First in 97 through 98, then 05 through 06. Later I was a regular Sun employee, but on the hardware side.

Re:Not a big deal

[Dun Kick The Noob]

Sorry, have to disagree, the problem is to do with management not idea generators and visionaries. Their job is to come up with ideas, management is to make the cash flow happen. Enterprise side licensing, training and certifications, better APIS, consultancy, tweaking hardware to work better on sun machines(controlled jvm on sun?) Controlling standards is no easy thing and SUN definitely did that. Problem was they couldn't tap the huge market potential. Perhaps thats what oracle is doing now, making it more profitable, sure some people will get pissed, but jobs are at stake. Cash flow comes first. A nice company wont last forever, its just not scalable. As for Gosling, he will rise again in whatever company that he decides to join but I wish that he start his own. Too many app builders and so few raw tech companies these days. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Not a big deal

[oldhack]

So you saw them from their peaking to downfall. I didn't mean to be accusitive. That whole period I worked at an outfit less than 10 miles away.

Re:Not a big deal

[Sulphur]

That whole period I worked at an outfit less than 10 miles away.

Close enough.

Re:Not a big deal

[oldhack]

Well, Ok, not very close, but you know, SUN dragged huge shadow there, you know.

Re:Not a big deal

[fm6]

People seem to be reading my post to say Gosling sat around playing video games for 10 years. Not my intent. Just pointing out that he's moved totally away from creating new products.

Re:Not a big deal

[thoughtsatthemoment]

You are making a Greek tragedy out of this. Java was a marketing idea from the beginning. He is not as visionary as you might think.

Re:Not a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Can this be mod'd up even more? Having worked at Sun for quite some time it was clear that a lot of really smart people held positions where they got to pontificate and be evangalists but didn't really deliver much to the bottom line. Oracle doesn't work that way from what I can tell.

bad

[z-j-y]

1st, you can't get any unemployment check if you resigned.

I'm not surprised he left java. the direction of java is clearly out of the control of the fathers of the language, their design principles cannot withstand pressure from the "community" who want shinny new things without considering the consequences.

Re:bad

[oldhack]

Java was born in SUN's battle with Microsoft, and rallied the industry (the "community" as you noted) behind it, producing some abomination like EJBs. Nevertheless, despite it all, the core remained such that it more/less became the successor to C as the language for education and application programming.

It's an interesting contrast to Python, another language that "grown-ups" like.

Re:bad

[pipatron]

I don't really think he needs that unemployment check.

Re:bad

[timmarhy]

unlike your job at burger king, he would have plenty of money put away to not have to worry about unemployment checks.

Re:bad

[Hal_Porter]

Yeah but he doesn't have a freezer full of Whoppers

Re:bad

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not surprised he left java. the direction of java is clearly out of the control of the fathers of the language, their design principles cannot withstand pressure from the "community" who want shinny new things without considering the consequences.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here, specifically, but I suspect it's the proposal to add first-class functions (closures, lambdas, ...) to Java.

If so, it's rather ironic, because Gosling himself said that he originally intended to have that in the very first version of the language - they only took them out because they wanted things to be a bit more explicit with respect to resource allocation and lifetime, since "customers coming from C++ would be suspicious of too much magic".

Re:bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he has money put away, maybe not.

Maybe he has a penchant for high priced hookers and strippers, and gambles away at Vegas on the weekends.

Re:bad

[petermgreen]

The java language itself doesn't seem to have changed that much. Sure they added generics and autoboxing in 1.5 under pressure from C# but there is still no operator overloading and there is still a very inflexible type/parameter system that practically forces coders to generate a lot of small memory allocations many of which will quickly become garbage.

The libraries OTOH have grown hugely over the years.

Re:bad

[TheRaven64]

And when Gosling was asked what he'd do differently if he had to create Java again, he replied 'leave out classes'. JavaScript with namespaces is a lot closer to his current thinking - not surprising, as Sun recruited most of the Self team to make their Java VM not suck in the mid '90s.

Re:bad

[shutdown -p now]

And when Gosling was asked what he'd do differently if he had to create Java again, he replied 'leave out classes'. JavaScript with namespaces is a lot closer to his current thinking - not surprising, as Sun recruited most of the Self team to make their Java VM not suck in the mid '90s.

That is an oft-quoted phrase of his, and it is also almost always completely misunderstood. It's not that he wants prototype-based OO a la Self or JS. He was rather referring to various problems that come up with class (i.e. implementation) inheritance as the only language-provided way to reuse code in Java. Instead, he wants to only see interface inheritance, and classes strictly as a mechanism of implementing interface - and mixings/delegation as the mechanism of code reuse. The fact that Java doesn't easily enable that later bit is what he referred to as a mistake.

Here is an article that treats it in more detail, and also gives the complete context for the Gosling reference that you have cited.

it's not too late

[circletimessquare]

for him to brush up on his vb.net skills

and maybe he should get some ms access experience

Re:it's not too late

[wmbetts]

I really wish I could mod you funny :)

Re:it's not too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript.

I never could understand Java

[PatPending]

Finally long super volatile import Ellison break instanceof native abstract class Glosling.

Re:I never could understand Java

[shutdown -p now]

Do you prefer Perl, $@%#&?

Oh good grief...

[IANAAC]

As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.

Just say that you can't answer. It's very likely that it's not at all difficult to answer and you just can't talk about it.

You did some fine work, but things have changed. That often happens.

Re:Oh good grief...

[maestroX]

Just say that you can't answer. It's very likely that it's not at all difficult to answer and you just can't talk about it.

Perhaps it's too painful.
Word on the street is they changed the office machines to roasted grain beverage.

BREAKING NEWS!! "JAVA IS DEAD", SAYS GOSLING!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue fat lady!!

Re:BREAKING NEWS!! "JAVA IS DEAD", SAYS GOSLING!!

[Hal_Porter]

Java is the fat lady these days.

Re:BREAKING NEWS!! "JAVA IS DEAD", SAYS GOSLING!!

[Compaqt]

>Cue fat lady!!

You mean Queue?

Been w/ Java since 1996... I left it too

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly because the back end mess it has evolved into is such a nightmare to work with. Who wants to work with Struts, Spring, Hibernate, JSTL, Maven etc. just to make a login form... a Slashdot article hinted that Java is the next COBOL... and sadly... that's what it seems to have become.

Java is dead, long live Java.

Re:Been w/ Java since 1996... I left it too

[Tim C]

Out of interest, who or what is forcing you to use any of those technologies? I've been working with Java commercially for around 8 years now and have never once used Maven on a project, for example.

Very informative

[ls671]

Parent is very informative, please take action !

Eilson Wins! ... Sun Micro Killed ... Ein Vounder!

[Anonymous Coward]

nough said.

However, will Eilson now kill Oracle in order to cash out.

Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

... like the lack of a pre-processor ...

... and making everything a class (oh - already did that one) ...

... and StupidlyLongNamesForSoManyThingsThatItsNotFunny (which is one reason it really needs a pre-processor - terse but readable is better than verboseAlphabetSoup).

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thoughtsatthemoment]

Well, how long is too long? Even in C code you can use long names without having to resort to MACROS to save typing.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Well, how long is too long? Even in C code you can use long names without having to resort to MACROS to save typing.

Huh? Want to try that again??

BTW, the pre-processor does more than macro expansion. There's conditional #includes, for example. And there's the ability to override $defines with -D from the command-line. And doing some nice stuff with make.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thoughtsatthemoment]

try what again? I know what pre-processor does. I just don't see the reason to criticize Java for long names.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[shutdown -p now]

... and making everything a class (oh - already did that one) ...

The mistake was rather not making everything a class. Smalltalk has already demonstrated long ago just how elegant the whole thing can be when you go all the way.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

like the lack of a pre-processor

Important perhaps, but not a critical thing. It is far worse that Java wasn't properly OO from the get-go.

and making everything a class

You forgot the "not" in there. Not making everything a class in Java was a big mistake that is still tripping things up. It was "fixed" by adding compile-time auto-boxing, which made things WORSE, not better.

I don't know that there is anything in Java that has too long class or method names, but anyone can obviously do that when they develop code. I don't see how that has anything to do with the language. Should they have limited the number of characters to, say 16, for class and method names?

Properties - java needs properties. Why? Because properties can ONLY be changed using the getter and setter methods. Even from inside the class. That is a Good Thing (TM) and it removes the ability to write some rather common error-prone code. Like, when someone in a re-factoring situation decides to add some sensible logic to a getter or a setter, but other parts of the same class still accesses the property directly. Badness ensues.

Lambdas and friends...

Hmmmm, seems like I just described C# as the solution to Java's problems... that was unintentional.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[anarche]

... and making everything a class (oh - already did that one) ...

yeah i always thought that some of the basic constructs shouldn't be classes. common things like ints shouldn't need to be boxed..

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[ClosedSource]

I'm not a big fan of Java, but the lack of a pre-processor is hardly a bad thing. Reading between the lines of what Stroustrup says about C macros, if they weren't necessary to maintain compatibility with C, he wouldn't have included them in C++ either.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Antique Geekmeister]

C coding standards don't encourage it as a standard. TheMixedCapitalizationReallyDoesHurtProgrammersHands, and ItEncouragessSpellingIssuessForPeopleWhoCantCountExcesLetterSes.

Now find the spelling errors in my function names.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thoughtsatthemoment]

The traditional C way is names like strcpy, sprintf, etc. But would names like string_copy, string_print_with_format be better?

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Antique Geekmeister]

Yes, they would. Fragmenting the words is far more legible than incredibly long mixed case, even thought the _ is a bit harder on the typist. And the fragmentation encourages consistency of grouping libraries of functions in a more visible fashion.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thoughtsatthemoment]

Grouping is indeed very important. Although print_string_with_format is more natural, string_print_with_format can group all string function together.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Anonymous Coward]

and Smalltalk is nowhere to be found any more.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[TheRaven64]

In Smalltalk, everything is an object, not a class. And Self demonstrated that you don't need classes for a pure OO language. So does JavaScript, for that matter, but it has its own problems (namely, Java syntax with Self semantics, which just ends up confusing everyone).

As someone who's worked on both C and Smalltalk compilers, I'm in two minds about the preprocessor. Conditional compilation is a huge problem. If you run cc -E on the same C program on two different platforms, you will often get two different results. This makes it very difficult to find bugs that occur on only one platform, but it also means that distributing the code in any form other than source is not possible for cross-platform deployment. If you compile a typical C program with clang or llvm-gcc down to LLVM IR, for example, the resulting code is not portable.

The other big problem with the C preprocessor is that it makes it really hard to analyse source code. You need to look at the code both before and after preprocessing to reason about it sensibly for things like document generation or semantic analysis. If you just look after preprocessing, then conditional compilation will be ignored. If you just look before, then macros look like functions.

Note that this isn't really an argument against preprocessors. Lisp and Smalltalk both have nice features that are equivalent, but they work on ASTs, not on tokens. In (some implementations of) Smalltalk, you can send messages to the parser as its parsing, which is a really powerful feature. In Lisp, macros are basically Lisp programs that take a Lisp program as input and produce a Lisp program as output. The uniform structure of the language makes them much easier to work with.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thetoadwarrior]

There is nothing wrong with Camel Case and holding shift to make a capital letter is no different than holding shift to create an underscore_.

The Java name will be much more clear to everyone and you don't have to type it out thanks to shortcuts and code completion. Who the hell writes out System.out.println when you can do sout?

Sure they could have just used sout and while I don't agree with dumbing down programming, that doesn't mean you should go out of your way to make it harder for new people.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Antique Geekmeister]

Amusingly, Slashdot is choking on the lengthy examples I'm trying to quote, complaining about excessively long strings.

If you do all your coding by cut & paste inside a GUI, I suppose you don't care. But the "_" is far easier to read and differentiate elements in. And I've wasted far, far too much time in the last few years with careless programmers misusing such confusing syntax for mistyped local versions of functions, propagating them into different levels of the Java hierarchies, and having to go clean it up later. The tendency to mistype, to miss plurals, and to alternatively use or not use articles or to fail to capitalize them wastes a lot of programmer time.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thetoadwarrior]

I have no problem reading either. The only thing I've ever had issues with is PHP which mixes both camel case and underscore usage. Sometimes when you start using methods you don't use much you can end up forgetting if it's camel case or not.

Other than that, I've had no problem writing/reading Java or PHP in Netbeans, notepad++/vim or even Nano.

Perhaps people find it hard when they stick to one way and only step into the other once in awhile and maybe I find neither to be a problem because I use both on a regular basis.

Maybe I don't mind writing it because I maybe use an IDE that does have code completion for big ass Java package names but I don't think anyone should be writing big Java apps in Notepad and I like something that's descriptive because it, along with decent Java docs can mean not having to look up information on wtf the method /class does.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

I agree that auto-boxing is retarded and a waste of resources.

[rant] However, there's no need to make everything a class, and I'm not a big fan of requiring every piece of data to have a getter and a setter. It leads to a lot more code. Look at horrific php classes that people just add so many methods to "just in case", even though the derived object is only instantiated to perform a few functions, then destroyed - it's not like a long-running program, where you have to take into account a lot more potential interaction.

[/rant]

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Compaqt]

>... like the lack of a pre-processor ...

Use m4? ... and making everything a class (oh - already did that one) ...

Every function needs to be enclosed in a class, but you don't have to use an object-oriented paradigm. A class can just be a collection of miscellaneous static functions. They don't have to operate on "this". Pass in what you want them to operate on.

Collect 'em all in a class called Global or Util.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Sure, but even c++ is no longer c++. The original goals that made c nice (simplicity, tiny language), and originally made c++ "a better c" for those who wanted "c with classes" are long gone with TR1.

I bought the TR1 book, and read it twice, just in case my first impression was wrong, and I still think "Good $DIETY, go on a diet!" It's not like you can't do object-oriented code in straight c (or even assembler - Borland wrote some nice stuff about how to do that in their Assembler manuals).

Oh well, maybe I'll read it a THIRD time if too many people throw rocks at me for this comment, but I think TR1 has cooties.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Compaqt]

Is underscore_separated really easier than camelCase?

For camelCase, you have to hold down the Shift key.

But for underscore_separated, you have to hold the Shift and hit the underscore key, which another character to type.

I understand that some editors don't stop at the case shift, but many programming editors today do.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

If you want to use "string_copy" or "string_print_with_format", just #define them using variadic macros (macros that take a variable number of arguments).

This way you don't incur the overhead of a function call to pass the arguments from your custom string_copy to strcpy.

In Java, since you don't have a preprocessor, you can't do that.

The solution, of course, is to use a script to invoke the c pre-processor to do any macro processing, and then invoke the java compiler to wrap the code in a class. It works, btw, but it would be nice if it were possible to do it natively.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Compaqt]

Netbeans code completes a full word when you type the initials of a camel case symbol.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Compaqt]

I agree with Java should have (had) properties.

It's crazy writing getter and setter methods for little benefit over the properties way. Just create a property, set the access level, and later change it to a method if you want.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

I don't think anyone should be writing big Java apps in Notepad

Here, let me fix that for you ...

I don't think anyone should be writing in Notepad

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

I write it without using any class syntax, and use a script to have the c pre-processor and some custom #includes to emit a java source file with it all wrapped nicely in a class. This way, my source code looks like c, and doesn't have the fugly long names.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

No need for using getters and setters even if everything is a class. Operator overloading and Properties takes care of it for you:

public class MyClass {
public class Property { get; set; }
}

...

MyClass mc = new MyClass();
mc.Property = Value; // Calls the setter
if( mc.Property == AnotherValue ) { // Uses getter and possibly overloaded ==
}

Clean. Easy. Safe. Beautiful.

And I am again aghast at using such superlatives about a Microsoft improvement over Java, but an improvement it is. Language wise for sure.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Jherico]

This way you don't incur the overhead of a function call to pass the arguments from your custom string_copy to strcpy.

Right... cause function call overhead is usually the limiting factor in a program's performance.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

... which again introduces extra code behind-the-scenes ...

... which makes for crappy runtime performance ...

... and this isn't new, and it isn't from Microsoft. Borland had the exact same thing in Delphi 1.0 for Windows 15 years ago - you could define a property, and an associated getter and setter (or just a getter, or just a setter), and it would work the same way.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

In Java, the need to call methods IS a huge performance hit. Get rid of that and you remove at least 80% of the "it's slowwww" complaints.

The overhead is bad enough in a compiled program - in a runtime-interpreted environment like Java*, it's a LOT worse.

*Java is interpreted, So before everyone flames - yet again - that it's "compiled" - do your research and get over it already.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[shutdown -p now]

In Smalltalk, everything is an object, not a class.

Every value is an object. Every type is a class.

And Self demonstrated that you don't need classes for a pure OO language. So does JavaScript, for that matter, but it has its own problems (namely, Java syntax with Self semantics, which just ends up confusing everyone).

True, but I wouldn't say that Self (much less JS) is more elegant than Smalltalk.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

this isn't new, and it isn't from Microsoft

I don't think anyone ever said it was neither new nor from Microsoft. Does it add bloat? Not really. Does it make for crappy performance? Nope.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Jherico]

You sir, are speaking out of your ass. Here are some hard numbers for you. I wrote the same test in C and in Java, which is basically a test of function call speed. Here is the Java version:

public class recurse {

public static void main(String[] args) {
factorialRecurse(12);
}

public static void factorialRecurse(int val) {
for (int i = 0; i < val; ++i) {
factorialRecurse(val - 1);
}
}
}

and the C version

void factorialRecurse(int val) {
int i =0;
for (i ; i < val; ++i) {
factorialRecurse(val - 1);
}
}

void main(int args, char * * argc)
{
factorialRecurse(12);
}

The code in question was compiled and executed. The java version took about 7 seconds to run. The C version varied between 10 seconds for the O2 level optimizations and 5 seconds for the O3 level optimizations and above. Hardly compelling evidence for 'Java function calls are slow'.

Java is interpreted, So before everyone flames - yet again - that it's "compiled" - do your research and get over it already.

Once again you are engaged in rectal whistling. Java is compiled to non-platform specific bytecode, and then depending on the JVM may or may not be transformed into CPU specific instructions at runtime. There are also tools out there to compile Java code directly to machine code as well as interpreters for C and C++. There's a good discussion of the intepreted vs compiled topic here

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[swilver]

The lack of a pre-processor is probably the biggest reason why Java became so popular. It made the language both easier to maintain and easier to get started with.

The second two you have under control yourself.

Don't want a class for everything? You can make one and use everything as static and program like in the C days.

Long names? Oh yes, I forgot, Java enforces a minimum name length of 20...

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[swilver]

And there we have it. The reason why people use Java.

There's no #DEFINE that turns a readable program that everybody knows into a program that has you looking through .h files every 3 seconds. You cannot "redefine" things, so a program is ALWAYS recognizable. An int is an int. A long is a long. The preprocessor was not included exactly to avoid these kinds of things.

That and the Java coding standards that Sun created is why Java projects have a much shorter learning curve. You can be productive within a day on most Java projects, unlike some of the C projects I've seen, even the ones that are generally considered to be well structured.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[thoughtsatthemoment]

It's easier to read as it is closer to an English sentence, like space between words, no uppercase in the middle of the sentence. I don't know about typing though as my typing is far from being that advanced.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

To force a function or method call behind the scenes call when a direct assignment to a variable would do DOES add both bloat and reduces performance. That's basic knowledge that anyone who knew how programming languages work would "get" right away.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

A difference of 40% in favour of c is hardly trivial. And there are compilers that are a LOT better at optimizing than GCC - ask Intel. Up to 3x or better performance.

Java is compiled to non-platform specific bytecode, and then depending on the JVM may or may not be transformed into CPU specific instructions at runtime.

and you just proved you don't know what you're talking about. bytecode is NOT compiled code and can NEVER be executed directly, so it HAS to be interpreted at runtime. Java is an interpreted language. Get over it, silly goose.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Use a modern editor like vim, and ctags, and you're all set.

Heck, even kate is smart enough to be able to open an associated .h file when you open the .c file.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Jherico]

A difference of 40% in favour of c is hardly trivial

You claimed that function call overhead was somehow responsible for some perceived slowness in Java. This implies some sort of massive difference in function call overhead, but the test demonstrates less than a single order of magnitude.

bytecode is NOT compiled code

It is actually, by virtue of a) not being source code and b) being the output of the java compiler. From Wikipedia: Bytecode is a term which has been used to denote various forms of instruction sets designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter as well as being suitable for further compilation into machine code.

[bytecode] can NEVER be executed directly, so it HAS to be interpreted at runtime

I never suggested that bytecode was executed by the host processor. If you want call execution by the JVM 'interpreted' as opposed to 'executing compiled code' you can try to make that distinction, but its certainly not interpreting the original sourcecode, and as I believe I pointed out, the Sun JVM is perfectly capable of turning the bytecode into actual machine code for the current platform. You're dangerously close to veering into 'no true Scotsman' territory here with your arguments. Go read the linked discussion and articles. Or you could... you know... make a few flat out assertions that are at best misleading or at worst completely wrong.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Bytecode is not compiled code that can be executed directly on a cpu. It requires runtime interpretation. Java is totally an interpreted language - which wasn't the original intent. They f*ed it up. And a 40% difference is VERY significant. And I'm sure someone could redo it with templates and bring the difference up to 1,000% to 10,000% or better.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

C++ using template metaprogramming - 3,138 times (3,138,000%) faster than Java. And that's with NO compiler optimizations.

And you can't do this in Java because - guess what - you don't have a preprocessor.

Java sucks in large part because it lacks a preprocessor, on top of being too class-bound.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

template<int n>
struct Factorial
{
    enum {RET=Factorial<n-1>::RET*n};
};

template<>
struct Factorial<0>
{
    enum{RET=1};
};

int main() {
    printf("Factorial(12)=%d\n", Factorial<12>::RET);
    return 0;
}

3 million times faster ... that alone makes it worth having a pre-processor.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[Jherico]

The point of the code that I wrote was that it makes N! function calls in each language, thus comparing apples to apples. The code you wrote calculates N! using 0 function calls. Of course your code runs faster, it makes no functions calls instead of half a billion and acts as if the point is to calculate 12!.

Yes, the pre-processor can convert an arbitrary example whose point is to execute half a billion function calls into no function calls. By one measure you've sped up the program, but by another you've broken it because its no longer a comparison of the same property in two languages (speed of making a function call). You've also made it harder to debug, breaking one of the cardinal rules of software development, that maintainability is more important than performance gain. If you were writing a full size program and had inserted this into your code, you'd have also broken one of the cardinal rules of optimization: "Don't, not until you've actually benchmarked the program and found out where the bottlenecks are".

The preprocessor is virtually never used the way you demonstrate. Its primary use in every environment I've seen (and I've seen a few) is to include a shit-ton of macros in one universally included header to smooth over differences between platforms and compilers. Occasionally its used for evil, like shoehorning in class metadata or trying to overcome the insufficiently defined RTTI infrastructure in C++.

You can argue the benefits of the macro pre-processor till you're blue in the face, but when it comes down to it, 9 out of 10 use cases for the preprocessor are for solving problems that simply don't exist in Java, and the performance use case you're making is dubious at best.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

1. The real problem with your code is that it actually does nothing. It doesn't calculate the factorial of a number. A proper test would actually produce a result.

2. The cardinal rule for optimization when you've been coding for more than a quarter-century is optimize early, optimize often - including when you're doing the initial design, where you get the biggest pay-off from optimizations by eliminating code (and bugs) that you don't have to write :-) Tat also increases maintainability. Java is not all that maintainable when you need an IDE to hold your hands.

3. Pre-processor meta-programming is useful because you can see things like overflow at compile time. Try doing that with Java. You simply can't.

4. "is to include a shit-ton of macros in one universally included header" - use a real environment, not Windows. Our header that contained the differences between networking and socket code between bsd and linux was 30 lines long - mostly comments and white space.

5. RTTI is evil. Spend more time thinking about what you're really trying to accomplish, and you can always eliminate it.

6. The fact is that Java still under-performs - in your example, by 40%. In other examples, by a lot more. Look at screen redraws. There's a reason First-Shooter games aren't written in Java.

7. Even if your "9 out of 10" argument is true, that means that 10% of the time, Java would benefit from a preprocessor. Your numbers, not mine :-) Why not give it a try? Java as it stands today is a piece of bloated crap. (and C++ is heading down the same road). Use the preprocessor to at least slim it down from the programmers perspective.

My original statements stand:
1. Java needs to lose the "everything should be a class" model;
2. Java needs to get a pre-processor - nobody HAS to use it, but when used by someone who knows how to use a pre-processor it's darned handy;
3. (not in the original list) Java needs to have an "emit a native binary" mode (not where the runtime is included, but where, instead of emitting byte-code that's interpreted by a JVM, it produces code that runs directly on the hardware without a JVM (in other words, either emit c code and compile it, or directly emit machine-executable instructions).

That last one would make Java a really nice tool, from prototyping to deployment. It would also eliminate some of the speed problems Java has.

Otherwise, Java will continue to lose ground, which would be a shame - it has its uses.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

To force a function or method call behind the scenes call when a direct assignment to a variable would do DOES add both bloat and reduces performance

Sigh. Until you know the basics of compilers and their construction, you really shouldn't utter any more of your nonsense. As you absolutely correctly state - a direct assignment is much faster than a method call. Everybody knows that, even compilers. If a setter method is nothing but an assignment ALL compilers will consequently inline the method, so once your code is compiled, it IS a direct assignment. All compilers will do this, even the ones from Microsoft.

There will be cases where the programmer puts an amount of logic into the setter - say validation for example - and in such cases the compiler may or may not inline the code, depending on what the logic does. In such cases the method may be slower, but that is no different from a situation where one didn't have properties, since a setter method would be required anyway.

That's basic knowledge that anyone who knew how programming languages work would "get" right away

That is a funny statement since you obviously didn't know that any compiler not written by a Computer 101 student will inline code like this:
String mySetter( String val ) {
myProperty = val;
}

Oh, I may inadvertently have used a term you do not understand here. Inlining is essentially the process of turning the code above into a direct assignment, essentially replacing the three lines with a direct assignment. I am simplifying a little for you since you clearly have very limited exposure to this computer stuff. Inlining like this is one of the absolutely easiest things to do for a compiler, and they all do. The smarter runtime environment for dynamic languages are even able to inline at runtime if they realize that even a more complex piece of code, perhaps with conditionals, will always be a direct assignment.

Now, if you think it is vital that you replace the code above with myProperty = val; just in case your particular compiler was not written to inline such code, you need to read your Knuth again and again and again. Look for the phrase "Premature Optimizations".

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

Oh, and just to be clear, a compiler can, if it wants to, inline ANY code, but that would obviously (to anyone who has a minimum amount of knowledge about software development) sacrifice size for speed. Where there is no sacrifice, as in the simple setter above, the compiler will inline.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[krischik]

... like the lack of a pre-processor ...

You can always add your own. JavaME for example has one and it can be used for "normal" Java code as well.

... and making everything a class (oh - already did that one) ...

If only they did. But there is still int, char and boolean. SmallTalk was more consequent here.

... and StupidlyLongNamesForSoManyThingsThatItsNotFunny (which is one reason it really needs a pre-processor - terse but readable is better than verboseAlphabetSoup).

I blame the import statement here. Example: java.io.IOException - twice IO in the name? Why? Because every tutorial teaches you to import each and every class - and as a result you need to create class names which are unique. The hole advantage of having packages in the first place is completely lost by over use of the import statement.

Martin

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

You totally fail because you miss one point - JAVA IS NOT A COMPILED LANGUAGE. It's an interpreted language, so your arguments about compiler optimization simply don't apply.

And you assume, to your error, that I'm a n00b. I'm fully aware of compiler optimizations by in-lining code - I was writing c back before there was a standard - when you had to manually decide which chunks of code to inline to make the trade-off between speed and bloat (memory was measured in kb, not gb or even mb).

Sheesh. Kids nowadays.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

I totally agree on that last one - I refuse to import whole packages - it's stupid. Instead, I use a macro that expands to the full class name. If java *had* a pre-processor, there wouldn't be the need to do things like the class name bogosity that you pointed out.

The advantages -

1. My source isn't polluted with excess verbosity, so it's easier to read
2. If there's any question as to what class is actually being used, the intermediate output shows the full path to the class in every statement, so you know the class/package.

It's the only way I'll ever work with Java. Anything else just sucks too much.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

You totally fail because you miss one point - JAVA IS NOT A COMPILED LANGUAGE. It's an interpreted language, so your arguments about compiler optimization simply don't apply.

You just failed computer 101. Java is in fact a compiled language. It is compiled into an intermediate code called bytecode. This is done by the java compiler, command line is javac. Example javac MyClass.java. This compiler can do, and DOES do optimizations. So, your dreaded getter and setter is compiled into inline bytecode assignments, direct assignments if you wish, in bytecode.

What happens to the bytecode once it has been compiled depends on the runtime environment. Most Java runtime environments today utilize a JIT compiler. This stands for Just In Time. A JIT compiler takes the compiled bytecode and compiles it, on the fly, just in time, to native code.

And you assume, to your error, that I'm a n00b

I have no idea what kind of experience you have with various programming tasks. You proved in your posting that you have NO CLUE what Java is however. If you need to know my credentials in Java I delivered my companies first enterprise class Java application in 1998. That was before J2EE.

Sheesh. Kids nowadays.

Funny comment. I could also tell you about the work I have done in the telecom industry with embedded agents on million-dollar telecom equipment. Agents written in very, very tight quarters, mostly in C. It would be cruel though, particularly since it appears that you are still living in the age where the inline keyword was still important. When writing generic code for embedded stuff, using the inline keyword in C code was not appropriate however, since inline in C is only a suggestion to the compiler, it doesn't have to follow your suggestion. The only way to ensure inline was using macros.

But hey, you just showed the entire world that you have absolutely no clue what Java is - "interpreted language" - sheesh, clueless morons these days.

If you want to learn interesting things about JIT compilers, a technology that has the possibility of achieving FAR better optimizations than even static compilers can do, this list is a place to start: http://www.program-transformation.org/Transform/JavaDynamicCompilers. I suggest you read that, and A LOT more before you say REALLY stupid things like "JAVA IS NOT A COMPILED LANGUAGE". You are just flaunting your ignorance.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Compiled languages are executed directly by the cpu. Java is no more a compiled language than a Word doc is.

What do you think the JIT in the run-time does? It translates the bytecode (which is a misnomer, because it is not executable by the cpu), into native instructions, same as those old basic interpreters do.

Again, JAVA IS NOT A COMPILED LANGUAGE. And I've WRITTEN an assembler from scratch way back when, so I know a bit about computers ... certainly more than you.

You really don't know what you're talking about. Parroting crap off the web. Fool.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

Compiled languages are executed directly by the cpu

Sigh. All software is executed directly by the CPU one way or another. Some software, most notably Java and .NET languages are COMPILED to an intermediary code that is then COMPILED again to native CPU code. During BOTH of those COMPILE rounds, the COMPILER can do any and all optimizations that it wants to. For example, as was discussed here, inline code. Your claim was that since Java was an interpreted language (it is not, but the bytecode MIGHT be) optimizations were not possible. That is meaningless drivel since the compiler, when compiling to bytecode, can easily do optimizations.

What do you think the JIT in the run-time does

Sigh. Yes, the JIT runs the bytecode. The bytecode that was COMPILED by the Java COMPILER from Java source code. You seem to be under the illusion that the only thing a compiler can produce is native code, which is of course a good indication of how amazingly ignorant you are of the fundamentals of computers. The first COMPILER I wrote was written in C, it was a pascal COMPILER that COMPILED Pascal code into C code. The fact that the output was C didn't make it less of a compiler.

Oh, and btw moron, I can GUARANTEE you that there is almost (or absolutely) NO compilers on the market today that produce native code, that is typically the task of other processes running AFTER the compiler. Almost ALL compilers written since the 1970s compiled into INTERMEDIARY code which was then somehow translated into native CPU instructions.

The only person here who have shown a clear lack of understanding of the basics of computers is YOU. You have, for example, show that you have NO CLUE what a "compiler" is. Wikipedia is usually a good source:
A compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language

We KNOW that most Java compilers compiles Java source into something else than native CPU instructions, even though there is at least one (the GNU compiler) where the end result is native CPU instructions. So, if you use the GNU Java compiler tool set it is even a compiled language in your perverted definition of "compiled". What the output of the Java compiler was was never the topic. The topic was whether Java could be optimized by the compiler, and since the output is bytecode, optimizing away setters and getters is trivial for a Java compiler. This is true whether the output is bytecode or native cpu instructions.

As for who knows most about computers? I have no idea. You for one is the only one here who have repeatedly shown that you have no clue what a COMPILER is. You have flaunted that ignorance as a virtue which makes you a moron.

If you want to learn the basics of Compiler Construction, I understand Loudens book on the topic "Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice" is good. In it you will, for example, learn what a compiler IS, something you clearly do not yet know.

Oh, and BTW, writing an Assembler from scratch is EASY. A CHILD can do it. If you want to brag about your accomplishments try to brag about something that is difficult. If you want to brag, say something like "I have solved P=NP?". That would be impressive. When writing cross-platform compilers way back when, doing ASM was the mundane and trivially boring things everybody dreaded, and some times we were lucky enough not to have to.

Oh, and if you wrote an assembler once, you would KNOW that often the (final) output of a COMPILER would be something that eventually got passed to ASM (and the linker) and that ASM was the entity that translated the compiler intermediary code into native CPU instructions. Since you apparently didn't know this, I seriously doubt the truthfulness in this statement.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Oh, and if you wrote an assembler once, you would KNOW that often the (final) output of a COMPILER would be something that eventually got passed to ASM (and the linker) and that ASM was the entity that translated the compiler intermediary code into native CPU instructions. Since you apparently didn't know this, I seriously doubt the truthfulness in this statement

Not necessarily true. It's possible to write a compiler that directly generates machine code. Just like it's possible to write a real java compiler that compiles to native code instead of class files - which is what Oracle is going to have to do (or pay someone else to do) if they want Java to expand in scope.

Don't get me wrong - java has its place, but it the mistakes HAVE to be fixed, or 20 years from now, it will be dead.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

Not necessarily true. It's possible to write a compiler that directly generates machine code.

I am sorry, but have you had your reading comprehension skills tested? They appear to be very low. I said: "that often the (final) output". You do understand that this means it doesn't happen always, right?

which is what Oracle is going to have to do

So you really do not know that there are products out there that turn out a native executable from Java code? The GNU tool set for example. Since it has been out there for YEARS, and what seems to be your primary problem with Java hasn't been valid since 2002, it seems you really need to read up on things a little.

Do you seriously think that not producing native code in the compile phase is a problem for Java, then you have no clue whatsoever. "Interpreted" bytecode can easily be faster, some times A LOT faster, than native compiled code. If you don't believe me you HAVE been out of the loop since at least 1996. Since most bytecode interpreters today compile the code to native code, they can (and do) perform run-time optimizations. IBMs and other JITs monitor the running of the Java program and then they do run-time optimizations by re-compiling the code in real time. These optimizations can take run-time information into consideration when doing optimizations, something that is impossible with statically compiled languages.

There are also things that dynamic languages like Java etc can do that are more or less impossible with statically compiled languages. This makes dynamic languages like Java FAR more suitable for large enterprise apps than C or C++ for example. I would love to see someone developing a C++ enterprise application that scales to multiple servers and also supports Dynamic Injection. I would love to see someone write a C++ enterprise application where parts of the application, parts that were running at the time, were replaced without bringing down the application.

Honestly, if you write large enterprise applications (not off-the-shelf stuff) today in C or C++ you are totally insane since your productivity will be less than 10% of teams that use more sensible approaches.

Java has many problems. The fact that it is not a statically compiled language is NOT one of them.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[spitzak]

Just want to point out that #define is NOT the main reason you "have to look in .h files every 3 seconds" in many languages. Certainly I have often had to look up plenty of perfectly legal non-preprocessor code in .h files in order to figure out an API. Especially tracking down "what the hell is this type really" in C/C++.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

You keep referring to JITs, but I think you don't understand the meaning of the term.

Just-In-Time compilation means just that - it interprets the class file. So JITs are also interpreters.

Any time you're dealing with a class file, it's NOT compiled code - it's pcode.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

Sigh. So you are really saying that Just In Time COMPILATION is interpretation? Really?

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Grow up. You were wrong and can't admit it, which is really childish. The JVM is an interpreter, same as any other runtime environment.

Really. Just grow up.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

Grow up. You were wrong and can't admit it

On what point? That Java is a compiled language? I have shown you overwhelming support for this, and you have only made childish whining sounds. Was I wrong that Java could be optimized? Please show me. Also, explain why a google search for "Java compile-time optimization returns 276,000 results if such optimization is not possible.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

Proof that god must love idiot because he made so many of them.

Definition of interpreted language from wikipedia:

In computer programming, an interpreted language is a programming language whose programs are not directly executed by the host cpu but rather executed (or said to be interpreted) by a software program known as an interpreter. The source code of the program is often translated to a form that is more convenient to interpret, which may be some form of machine language for a virtual machine.

Java is an interpreted language

The JIT is run EVERY time you run the program - while the program is being interpreted. A true compiler is run only once, and the stand-alone executable is run without the need for an interpreter. And why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[terjeber]

Definition of interpreted language from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

And I quote from YOUR article: While Java is translated to a form that is intended to be interpreted, just-in-time compilation is often used to generate machine code - in other words... compiled.

It is funny when you are SO dumb that you provide Wikipedia documentation for it.

Further down in the article it says: Many interpreted languages are first compiled to some form of virtual machine code, which is then either interpreted or compiled at runtime to native code.

The above accurately describes Java. Java is first COMPILED to intermediary code, and then (these days) the intermediary code (or pcode) is COMPILED into machine code.

Thank you for referring to that article that ALSO proves you a moron.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[TheSunborn]

Dam this is stupid. Let me quote from the wiki text:

"Theoretically, any language may be compiled or interpreted, so this designation is applied purely because of common implementation practice and not some underlying property of a language"

So it does not even make sense to talk about a language being compiled or interpreted*. It is an implementation that is either using a compiler or an interpreter. A language can be designed to be compiled(And java,c and c++ is designed for this purpose), or it can be designed to be interpreted(php is very difficult to make a compiler for, due to the type system). But any implementation

Example: The first c++ compiler did compiler c++ to c. It was still a compiler. And there do exists c interpreters so c is not (always) a compiled language. Even if someone then used a c interpreter to run the compiled c++ code.

The current implementation of Java from Sun/Oracle does in fact use compilers. It use one compiler to compile java to bytecode, and then it use an other compiler to compile the bytecode to cpu instructions. Exactly when this process happens does not change the fact that its a compiler.

And for real fun: Is x86 code interpreted or compiled? Well I am currently running an x86 emulator with a jit, so my computer is currently compiling x86 code to different x86 code. This new x86 code is then interpreted by my cpu. But if I had a high end Intel CPU it might compile the x86 code to "intel micro code format" which would then be interpreted by the processor.

*compilation of java source to java bytecode may be part of the java specs, so if you make an program which interpret java sourcecode without outputting java bytecode, you may not be allowed to call it Java due to an incomplete implementation.

Re:Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java

[tomhudson]

No, what's really stupid is the two design errors I initially pointed out - that Java made everything a class (mistake #1, which we all learned was a dumb move by 1990, so there really was no excuse ...) and the lack of a preprocessor (instead implementing parts of one in javac for things like anonymous classes).

This is how java SHOULD have been designed from the ground up - instead of me having to implement it ...

1. FIXED: If you insist on the "everything is a class" paradigm (because it's kind of hard to undo the mistake at this stage of the game), hide the messier parts.
2. DONE: the use of of a pre-processor should be an integral part of the language
3. INFO: Never use an imports statement - polluting the namespace was a dumb idea, and required everyone to pick unique names throughout the standard class hierarchy.
4. IN PROGRESS: Just as not every class doesn't HAVE to look like a class, not every function call has to look like a function call. Make them into statements when there are no parameters, and save those endangered parenthesis ...
5. COMPLETED: StopWithTheExtraLongClassAndMethodNameStupidity - I went through EVERY single class (except the interfaces - I'll get to them soon) in 1.6, and was able to reduce ALL the classnames to unique syms of 31 characters or less.
6. COMPLETED: A Window is a Window is a Window. Don't call it a JFrame because you screwed up the namespace with the AWT and expect people to be entirely happy.
7. IN PROGRESS: gui applications shouldn't require a huge machine to run a bloated IDE and/or a fancy runtime framework.

Heck, if you're a php programmer, or just doing a single-class app, you can run c2jmain instead of c2j and hello world becomes a one-line program: echo("Hello,World!"); No includes, no imports, not even <?php and ?> tags.

He will be missed. One question though.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Is he quitting? Will he leave all his stuff behind for garbage collectors to pick up? Or will he clean up after him by hand?

"artistic differences"

[Bastard of Subhumani]

With mustard on, and because that's what Larry pays them to do.

I think it's pretty fair to guess they had some kind of disagreement (about the future openness of java? whether it has a future at all?) but there's some kind of confidentiality clause.

Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be the best place for him to go.

Re:Microsoft

[Hal_Porter]

But then Anders Hejlsberg will have him encased in carbonite and mounted on his office wall as a trophy.

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[spiffmastercow]

It depends on whether any of his coworkers use him as a reference.

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[tomhudson]

Is he quitting? Will he leave all his stuff behind for garbage collectors to pick up? Or will he clean up after him by hand?

Unfortunately, his garbage collector is non-deterministic.

Re:Eilson Wins! ... Sun Micro Killed ... Ein Vound

[tagattack]

Kill Oracle....hahahah.

Come on, you make money on high-end too

[SuperKendall]

Oracle still makes their money on software. Making money by selling people extremely expensive software licenses only really works if you can get various kinds of locks and holds on them

It ALSO works if you produce a far better product than other solutions that scales far better.

I don't use Oracle these days, but a decade ago it would be laughable to say Oracle did as well as they did by "locks and holds", they simply had a very powerful database that a lot of technical people liked using.

I would wager that is still true today, though for most common business uses even MySQL is fine at this point.

Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too

[bennomatic]

I think you're right. I work for a company which builds database driven software, and while we always have our eyes out for newer and better solutions, people I've talked to on the DEV team clearly feel that if you're looking to deliver millions of transactions per hour, Oracle's still the king of the hill.

Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too

[Omnifarious]

In order to get into a position where you can apply the locks and holds you have to make a good product. After you get there you can stop.

IMHO the industry is full of examples of companies that made excellent products and stopped getting any better or weren't able to move on when a new idea upset the applecart because they were so wedded to the lock-in and high profits they had with their original software, even after that software had become more of an albatross to most companies using it rather than an asset.

Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too

[Vintermann]

*cough*borland*cough*

Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too

[Anonymous Coward]

But for RAS ? Not so much. Ditto JBoss.

(I guess the Dev team don't have access to a couple of mainframes + DB2)

Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too

[HiThere]

I have only minor experience with Oracle, and that a decade ago.

The company that I was with was trying to move to Oracle for some reason. They asked Oracle to recommend a consultant to do some basic development. After over 6 months work, the consultant still hadn't delivered even a Gui data entry screen.

Now this doesn't really mean that Oracle is a lousy product, but it does mean that I don't trust their recommendations, proposals, or predictions.

Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too

[HiThere]

Sorry, Borland *isn't* an example. They were repeatedly sabotaged by MS. I'll admit that when they eventually tried to move to Linux their offering was inadequate, but by that point they'd been so beaten down by MS that they were nearly out of business. If they'd decided not to trust MS a few years sooner, they might still be quite an important software house.

I really don't know why so many companies make the same mistake. Management just seems incapable of learning. Or maybe they just can't believe that the FOSS environment would be any different...so the initial problems seem an insurmountable obstacle. (After all, if it's not going to be any better anyway, then why bother.)

But that's NOT the same problem.

Bye Bye, Java Patriarch. Goodbye, Mr Coffee

[Bob_Who]

Starbucks is convenient for unemployment.

Weird wording

[Anonymous Coward]

The article has some weird wording which makes it seem like it was written by someone whose native language isn't English and didn't have anyone edit it. For example:

"...continue to innovate the Java..."

"From what has been heard,..."

"...I would love to see Google, IBM (leaders in Java) watching closely on it."

It's annoying because it seems to flow well until you hit these awkward phrases.

Re:Weird wording

[Anonymous Coward]

It's annoying because it seems to flow well until you hit these awkward phrases.

They're Indian-isms. Stay in IT for a while and you'll get used to it.

why are you laughing at my comment?

[circletimessquare]

apparently his work history includes working with coffee, and that always comes in handy in an often environment

so this gosling fellow has a leg up on the competition in this downsized employment search market right there. at the very least a little chit chat about his experiences being a barista can break the ice in a job interview

how fast can he type?

I'm not saying oracle /isn't/ evil, but

[LukeCrawford]

I think that they get a worse rap than they deserve in the open source world. BTRFS anyone? it's not like they don't contribute at all.

I think the problem is twofold: first, they focus on marketing to the PHB- This is likely to get you a bad reputation amongst the techies, unless you are really careful about it. (hell, look at redhat; they deserve an awesome reputation amongst techies, considering the number of linux people they employ and how much they contribute. they have a mediocre reputation.) Second, Oracle seems to have a bad reputation amongst their Engineering staff, and guess what? we talk.

But overall, Oracle is very helpful towards linux; according to the linux foundation, they are in the top 10 companies contributing towards linux[1] (as measured by the number of changes submitted)

So yeah; I mean, I'm not switching to unbreakable linux any time soon, and they certainly aren't red hat, I do think Oracle's reputation should not be as bad as it is.

[1]http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf

Larry, can we get signed types, properties and clo

[melted]

Larry, can we get signed types, properties and closures now, please?

Oracle has no interest in crapifying Java

[symbolset]

They just have no interest in paying to produce free software. They're not in the business of giving stuff away. As much as it drives Oracle database sales, that's what they'll do and the connection has to be pretty direct and immediate.

Same with OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, MySQL, VirtualBox and all the others. Mr. Ellison has a pretty solid "row or get off the boat" philosophy. He didn't buy Sun for its freeware. He wanted it so he could play the bigger game.

The economy tanked and some legendary companies were put in distress. This is why prudent companies put aside a cash cushion - so that they can leverage distress and acquire cheaply valuable IP, assets, brilliance and brands. With the market lining up as a war between Cisco and HP for a converged solution including server, storage, network and software, Oracle looked across the vast swath of distressed companies and saw buying Sun as an opportunity to make it a three dog race.

Ellison has no intention of losing this race and has no problem casting out what he sees as ballast - in this case development costs that don't yield immediate profits he can use to get the rest of the pieces he needs to compete on this field. He'll keep Solaris and parts of VirtualBox that he can take proprietary because he needs an OS and a VM. He still needs a switch and router biz to make a go of it, so look for a big buy there.

It's time all hands got to forking - or at least mirroring.

Re:Oracle has no interest in crapifying Java

[assert(0)]

> It's time all hands got to forking - or at least mirroring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IcedTea

I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system now

[Lord of the Fries]

OK, I hate to see any human out of work and generally unhappy, that's the good moral way to feel. So as a fellow being, I grant Gosling that.

But I'm having a hard time seeing his "passing" from some sort of throne as the inventor of Java, as anything but a very belated sense of "finally!" (pun somewhat intended). Java was one of the worst things to happen in the evolution of Programming Language history. By selling itself as having features of dynamic languages, it marginalized just about every progressing dynamic language model and replaced them with something that Gosling described at OOPSLA 96 with the comment "will Java work? of course Java will succeed, there's not a damn new thing in it." Or at least so the myth goes. It's taken 15 years of stupidity and massive wastes of canceled project and total rewrites all in the name of "doing the mainstream thing" to finally realize that we're left with something that is only just short of the complexity found in C++, and as arcane and stiff to write in.

You can all mourn the passing of "Father of Java" or the passing of Sun the once-cool hardware maker. I think they both got what they deserved for ever foisting Java upon us. I hope James is forced to take a job maintaining some J2EE install with millions of spaghetti code lines.

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[FrankDrebin]

If he's looking for some advice in this regard, I have a few pointers...

Here, I printed my resume on a business card

[Anonymous Coward]

Objective: Gainful Employment

Education: N/A

Experience: Invented Java

Re:Here, I printed my resume on a business card

[ClosedSource]

HR would take one look at that and say "This guy must be joking, he didn't invent coffee" and then toss the resume in the circular file.

Re:Here, I printed my resume on a business card

[symbolset]

It's a joke, get it? This guy is the Isaac Newton of Java. He doesn't need a resume, nor a business card. He doesn't apply for work - work petitions him for the privilege of his attention. It's a completely different process.

Re:Here, I printed my resume on a business card

[ClosedSource]

What the hell does it mean to be "the Isaac Newton of Java"?

Re:Here, I printed my resume on a business card

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell does it mean to be "the Isaac Newton of Java"?

He invented Java and an apple once fell on his head, duh!

Re:Here, I printed my resume on a business card

[symbolset]

What the hell does it mean to be "the Isaac Newton of Java"?

Unless you're Dennis Ritchie it means you suck. We're going to want proof of your denial in the form of deterministica automata.

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[martin-boundary]

If he's looking for some advice in this regard, I have a few pointers...

java.lang.PointersAreNotAllowedException
at org.slashdot.javascript.JokeFactory.initGlobal(JokeFactory.java:207)
at joke.dynamics.Woosh.execute(Woosh.java:17)
at joke.Main.loadDynamics(Unknown Source)
at joke.Main.go(Unknown Source)
at joke.Main.access$0(Unknown Source)
at joke.Main$3.run(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:597)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:269)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:174)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:169)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:161)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:122)

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[binarylarry]

There's so much retardation in your post. I don't know where to begin.

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[GoatEnigma]

Coming from someone whose signature links to a list that claims that Eclipse is one of the reasons that Java is better than .Net.

IBM is not a hardware business

[symbolset]

In 2009 88% (pdf) of IBM's pre-tax income came from services and software. Sun wasn't making money on the software - it was a value add.

Ten years ago IBM did a strategy shift from hardware to services and software. To buy Sun would mark a new strategy. Maybe it's time, maybe not. I'm thinking IBM didn't think so. This market has a bit more shaking out to do. Apple is now going where IBM once hoped to go, and Sun wasn't a good buy for them either. IBM has the benefit of time. They take the long view. They can - their founders retired 80 years ago and they've successfully transitioned from growth mode to the utilities model. That's a feat one in ten thousand companies achieve.

The IT wars are not over. The tyrants of the new era are gathering their forces. There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage. Apple may yet choose to get into this fight. If there's a winner, it won't bode well for the rest of us. IBM transcended this fight long ago but there's an outside chance they could still stoop in. The prize is great - it's literally us. I don't think they will.

I think Apple will probably choose to win in the way that's been successful for them - in consumer electronics, content, in expanding ownership of the high end of new consumer markets, and letting other companies fight it out for the low-margin leavings. IBM will bide their time, and strike when the iron is hot. From the wounded they'll take the noblemen and heal their wounds. They'll fix up the folks who've been abandoned by dead or wounded technology providers or failed by active ones and be an isle of reliability in the storm. That's what they do, and they're good at it. They'll make good money, but they won't be the energetic driver of new technologies that they once were. HP does that now.

Re:IBM is not a hardware business

[ralphdaugherty]

There are now three groups: HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Each hopes to have complete ownership of the server room including network, server, software and storage.

      Why is IBM not in this list?

Re:IBM is not a hardware business

[symbolset]

I was expecting the question, "Why is Apple not in this list". Since you asked the question...

IBM is slow moving, and they're targeting software and services as nearly 90% of their offerring, as the grandparent post proves with a link. Network, server and storage are mostly hardware. Software and service is a fraction. If IBM wants in to this fight they're going to have to migrate from a service & software biz to a different type of organization or intrepeneur one. They're definitely able to get in this game if they want to - I just don't see them trying yet. If they get in they had better bring their A game, because people aren't going to want to hear the mainframe pitch in this space. They have the OS, the VM, the hardware and in all of those they're second to none. They're weak in storage. Hitachi isn't the best SAN partner but WTFEver, we're moving to SSD and iSCSI anyway. They still need a network to get convergence. They've got some serious patents in that regard, but what are they shipping in switches and routers? Nada.

Oh, yeah, and they're going to have to get over the whole price thing. The very word IBM makes people cringe. That's not a good way to start a dialog. Not giving prices has got to go. Most everybody that IBM hasn't already sold has a policy of "If you won't quote a price, it's too much" to counter the traditional "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". In my world if it hasn't got a list price and an expected discount, it's off the table.

Re:IBM is not a hardware business

[Anonymous Coward]

This past year I helped wean a state datacenter off of IBM to HP. That's several $M/y worth of business. Since HP didn't feel obligated to compensate me for that I'm inclined to anonymously tell IBM how to prevent a recurrence of this.

To IBM: Touch your customer. Give them what they need. Be there for them. Answer their calls. Express an interest in solving their problems. Serve them. Forget your f*d up marketing team and ask each and every customer "how may we serve you?" Then deliver exactly that - no less and no more. For God's sake when they call you, pick up the phone.

Re:IBM is not a hardware business

[hoggoth]

Re-read the parent post in the voice of the guy who narrates movie trailers, it makes it much more fun:

"In a world... where the IT wars are not over. The tyrants of the new era are gathering their forces..."

"In a world... where other companies fight it out for the low-margin leavings, IBM will bide their time, and strike when the iron is hot. From the wounded they'll take the noblemen and heal their wounds..."

"The prize is great - it's literally us"

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[binarylarry]

Actually that's a pretty valid point. .NET doesn't have an IDE that provides the tools, community and broad scope that Eclipse does. A lot of the newer features in Visual Studio today were added in a vain attempt to catch up to Eclipse.

Eclipse is it's own ecosystem, which you can't say for Visual Studio and especially not any of the horrible open source .NET IDE offerings.

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[Anonymous Coward]

They asked for his help but he refused to even give any pointers.

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[eexaa]

he could just do middleware monad for haskell.

Expecting new emacs?

[Czubaka]

Hey

He is also dad of emacs. I'm starting typing
      emacs --version
everyday. There must be something shinny new soooon.

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[SplashMyBandit]

Plus, Java has NetBeans, IntelliJ and others. NetBeans in particular has been coming on in leaps and bounds, and is much easier (and reliable) to use than either Eclipse or VisualStudio. Microsoft systematically crushed alternative provides (Borland etc) leaving the .NET ecology relatively barren and arguably infertile as a result.

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[HyperQuantum]

Larry, can we get signed types, properties and closures now, please?

Don't you mean UNsigned types?

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's a pretty valid point. .NET doesn't have an IDE that provides the tools, community and broad scope that Eclipse does. A lot of the newer features in Visual Studio today were added in a vain attempt to catch up to Eclipse.

Eclipse is it's own ecosystem, which you can't say for Visual Studio and especially not any of the horrible open source .NET IDE offerings.

you must be smoking crack.
there's no other way you could possibly write any of this.
Unless you actually replace visual studio with eclipse in your entire post.
Eclipse light years before vs...lol
visual studio doesn't have a community...jesus you really should be ashamed for even thinking that.

Reminds me of when Compaq bought DEC...

[ibsteve2u]

...after about six months, there was no longer any good reason to look to DEC's future anything. Seems the Sun is setting, too...

He's not that smart a technologist.

[Cyberax]

He's not that smart a technologist. Seriously, it took them 6 years to add closures (they'll be in JDK 7 which is due in 2011) and other trivial changes. WTF?

Look at Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft for a good example of technical leadership. Under his guidance .NET evolved from a carbon copy of Java to a quite interesting framework with unique features.

I'm seriously glad that I've switched my new project to .NET. At least, I can use a language with real generics, type inference, closures, lamdas and LINQ. It really feels uber-cool to use these features instead of writing reams of stupid Java code. Oh, and having a GUI framework which doesn't suck.

Also, read the recent Gosling's keynote speech http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=59733 - it's all about EJB3. He has nothing noteworthy except yet one more 'enterprisey' API standard. Fail.

Re:He's not that smart a technologist.

[TheRaven64]

Don't be mean to Java! In 2011 is is going to have all of the features of Smalltalk-76! Impressive, considering the number of ex-Self and ex-StrongTalk people who worked on it...

Re:He's not that smart a technologist.

[Viol8]

"It really feels uber-cool to use these features instead of writing reams of stupid Java code. Oh, and having a GUI framework which doesn't suck."

Way to go with the grown up critique.

"more 'enterprisey' API standard. Fail"

Don't you "like , totally epic fail dude"?

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[gwjgwj]

java.lang.NullPointerException

About IBM

[paxcoder]

If they're smart, they're probably hire these people anyway. If we're lucky, they'll be working on new IBM's free software products.
Alternatively, they can start a new company. That'd be cool. There are many things free that Sun had, they just need to be picked up. Who better to pick it than those who left it there? ;-P

Worst analysis ever

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't done much w/ databases, have you? Oracle is indeed powerful, but if you don't have a full-time highly trained and highly paid DBA (or preferably two) on staff to manage your installation, you are playing with fire. Any F/OSS database offering I can think of is far easier to manage, most offer all the capabilities most people need, and some are very powerful indeed (while still being infinitely easier to manage than Oracle). Oracle's many years of consolidating acquisitions into a single product offering has resulted in a beasty that is truly magnificent in its complexity.

And Apple's database? Right.

I mentioned databases, because we're talking about Oracle, but I don't think your argument holds water in any other tech arena either. Yes, Apple's products are easier to use, primarily because they don't do very much. Name a single business application offering out of Cupertino that competes against the big boys. Nothing. Nobody runs their business on iTunes and Garage Band. 100,000 little craplets on the iPhone, not one application with any depth whatsoever.

JAG Beer

[Anonymous Coward]

He could start a microbrew. I, for one, would drink JAG Beer. (Gosling is already taken). Just a suggestion. After seeing him at several JavaOne's, I think his heart's in brew.

Of course..

[Junta]

It seems Oracle is explicitly disinterested in Java, so IBM may get the one thing they would have wanted on the cheap, a chance at the people behind Sun's Java as they leave/are forced out of Oracle.

Re:Of course..

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Oracle is explicitly disinterested in Java,

Nope. The only strategic asset Sun has that Oracle needs is Java. Almost all of Oracle's software stack depends on Java. Having Java under the control of a hostile competitor would be a disaster for Oracle.

Personally, Java is an abomination upon the world, and the sooner it is put out to pasture the better. I have yet to see a well-written, fast, server-side Java app.

Re:Of course..

[hardwarefreak]

It seems Oracle is explicitly disinterested in Java, so IBM may get the one thing they would have wanted on the cheap, a chance at the people behind Sun's Java as they leave/are forced out of Oracle.

IBM has a chance if it lets these folks stay in the bay area and telecommute, or opens an office for them there. Environment plays a huge factor in people's lives and outlook, and moving from San Fran to say Yorktown Heights, NY probably wouldn't give these folks warm fuzzies. They'd probably prefer to stay in the bay area. Thus, I agree with a previous OP that this guy and others will likely end up at Google, or other bay area firms. It's called Silicon Valley for a reason. There are many companies there who could benefit from the talent that will be fleeing the sinking SUN ship. Both Intel and Apple are in the valley, as well as HP and others. Speaking of HP, now that Oracle has SUN's big iron, HP is the only one of the remaining general market big 3 Unix hardware vendors without its own DB engine. Oracle now has SPARC/OracleDB, IBM has i/p/zSeries and DB2, HP has SuperDome (Itanium) and offers OracleDB on top of HP UX or MS SQL Server on top Windows Datacenter Edition for Itanium.

Now that Oracle will have its own big iron to push for OracleDB, look for HP to acquire and build its own enterprise database engine or lavish resources upon PostgreSQL and push it. I'm sure up to this point HP has been just fine reselling Oracle and MSSQL. The acquisition of SUN is going to change HPs push of OracleDB atop HP UX, whether HP wants that or not. Ellison is going to push Oracle atop SPARC.

Then again, printers and ink cartridges make up something like 60% of HP's revenue, and servers and storage something like only 10%, so they may not really care if they can sell Unix iron in the future with a top notch DB atop.

Re:Of course..

[SenseiLeNoir]

Google would like to have a word with you! (Gmail, Buzz, Adwords, etc)

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. DIE JAVA, DIE!!!

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[sillybilly]

Hahaha.. what a good joke. You hit the nail on the head about java and dotnet. How much more retaded can it get?

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[noidentity]

Wait, Java only has unsigned types currently?!?

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[sillybilly]

I blame the university professors for java proliferation, not Gosling. He just meant well, but the checks and balances failed. And once the purist university professors so far removed from the real world settled on this abstraction bloat as core curriculum, MS had to follow suit by creating dotnet. MS did not have a choice. I think the general industry that purchases computer services and hires computer scientists needs to lobby the government to mandate passing a standard computer hardware architecture/assembler/C programming core exam, before awarding a BS in computer science or even an MCSE. Assembler knowledge is crucial. Whip out good old Borland Turbo C++ 3.1, and MSDOS hardware access. Which is how universities still teach computer science in India. Even in 2010. The basics are important. I'm thankful to my university engineering professor for teaching me how to measure flowrate with a bucket and stopwatch. The basics are everything.

Btw, MS is not guilty of java or dotnet, but they are guilty of sabotaging and overcomplicating access to the hardware by the programmer, including mandatory driver registration fees. Soon if you want to run any program, even a "Hello World", you'll have to purchase a run-permit from MS. Or Verisign. In the name of security. In a world where Windows refuses to run without an internet connection, without an umbilical cord to the MS servers, to where it constantly uploads a "nonpersonally identifiable" GUID history of clicks and typing actions. Because the only way to secure computing is to watch over and monitor every click and keypress anyone in the world is doing. How else can we trust that they are not about to write yet another virus?

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, how about you just suck my dick and call it even then motherfucker?

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[sillybilly]

Actually, Windows, Office, OS X and PC's will be a thing of the past. All we'll have will be cellphones, or cell-phone like devices, with unprogrammable and mysterious features to the user, which refuse to boot without a sim card and a functioning network connection. Then monitoring of every click is automatic, at the mercy of the corporation providing the "service". Why do you think Apple is coming up with all these permanently connected gadgets? You want freedom of computing? Standalone PC's will be banned. GNU and personal computing rights are irrelevant on my Nokia or Samsung with built in Bluetooth and megapixel cameras. The monthly fees are not. It's hard to ask for a monthly fee for a traditional PC, so it will be slowly eliminated from the market by market forces that see making more money on monthly fees than one time user licenses. Get your PC's while they are available. Vintage models without a built-in kill date are preferred. What is this world coming to? Total centralized control?

Is it Oracle or Sun that sucks?

[divisionbyzero]

Oracle has done a pretty poor job of retaining seriously talented people from Sun. On the other hand maybe these folks were pampered prima donnas at Sun who didn't produce anything that could be sold and are a part of the reason Sun folded? It's not like Java ever made Sun any money and at this point it's most significant contribution is Javascript.

Re:Is it Oracle or Sun that sucks?

[Miamicanes]

Sun didn't invent Javascript. Netscape did, under the name "Livescript". The "Javascript" name was pure marketing, and an attempt to benefit from Java's hype and buzz. The most significant thing Javascript has in common with Java is the first four characters of its name. Semantically, Javascript has more in common with Perl than it ever had in common with Java (no, I'm not saying Javascript == Perl, just pointing out that it has LESS in common with Java than it has in common with Perl)

Re:Is it Oracle or Sun that sucks?

[swordgeek]

Both.

The minute Jonathan Schwartz took over Sun, they started losing good people. He did the logical thing, and encouraged them to go, transforming Sun into an empty shell of a company, hostile to technology and technologists.

Oh, wait--that's doesn't sound so logical does it?

Basically, Schwartz deliberately destroyed Sun so he could sell it and make a (personal) profit. Oracle is notorious for hacking and slashing good people from companies they buy, so they're going to be just as damaging to the remnants.

Re:Is it Oracle or Sun that sucks?

[divisionbyzero]

Sun didn't invent Javascript. Netscape did, under the name "Livescript". The "Javascript" name was pure marketing, and an attempt to benefit from Java's hype and buzz. The most significant thing Javascript has in common with Java is the first four characters of its name. Semantically, Javascript has more in common with Perl than it ever had in common with Java (no, I'm not saying Javascript == Perl, just pointing out that it has LESS in common with Java than it has in common with Perl)

Ok, fair enough. So Java hasn't done anything of value. ;-)

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, don't we complain enough about Java being bloated? No, let's keep adding new JVM features, each introducing a thousand more quirks.

If this was ten years ago, radical changes would be more welcome. Now, hundreds of thousands of us average programmers earn our living with Java, and would like everyone to leave it alone, thankyouverymuch. Honestly, why not just pick another language to fuck with?

Re:He will be missed. One question though.

[Compaqt]

The situation is volatile. It was thought that Gosling's job as super Java Guy was protected, but the switch to new management has put a break in that theory. He's having to eat a byte of humble PI.

Don't worry, though, he'll return to a very public position in a short while.

I hope he will try to catch a good severance package. For if he doesn't, it'll char Oracle's goodwill.

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[Anonymous Coward]

And there's so much gayness in your post that I, uh.

Well actually I do know where to begin. Just let me spread my legs for you.....

*looks down*

need some help with my zip there?

Shades of another death

[nurb432]

This reminds me of when Atari finally faded into the dust. All the raw talent slowly dispersing into the industry, most to never be heard from again as they were absorbed into much larger corporate environments and forced to become part of the gray crowd.

Not a fan of Java myself, but i can appreciate what Gosling has done, and the impact of what is going on here as the SUN sets and the dark days come.

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[melted]

Yes. Unsigned.

The converse is also true

[theolein]

The company where I work uses a large, well-known European ERP software package. The actual software is truly not that good and the licenses and support costs are very high. Added to that the software will never fit perfectly into a customer's company and will need customising. IBM, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, SAP etc, all have an army of consultants that charge a fortune to do this kind of work, and while it's fine for a large company with a significant IT development and support budget, it's much harder for smaller companies to justify these costs. Very often they try to use COTS and end up paying a single external supporter/consultant a lot of money to customise or provide a solution that will often only work for as long as that consultant is around.

There are advantages in terms of know-how and long-term ease of use in using open source or in-house development. The initial costs are higher, but the flexibility can be really good this way.

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[Anonymous Coward]

Java already has unsigned types, they're just not terribly convenient to use.

You know what happens when you add 1 to 0x7FFFFFFF to an int in Java? You get 0x80000000, guaranteed. Granted, it always interprets this as -1...

Surprisingly, this isn't true in C. For historical/portability reasons, not all integers are two's complement, so the standard leaves the behavior in this case undefined.

Honestly, having to choose between multiple primitive integer types is a bit of a pain, especially in a language without typedefs. Java is probably better off without unsigned types.

If you're a hardcore bit twiddler, though, it's certainly possible to use the regular Java types as unsigned types. I've done it frequently for compatibility with external file formats that make use of unsigned fields.

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what happens when you add 1 to 0x7FFFFFFF to an int in Java? You get 0x80000000, guaranteed. Granted, it always interprets this as -1...

Or rather, -2147483648. I was in a bit of a hurry.

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[Timmmm]

Yeah but it does have an IDE that doesn't suck!

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame him, obviously he never worked in a professional environment.

Scala

[Laz10]

Java is legacy by now. It would be better left alone.

If you want more advanced features and a more complete thought out language, switch to Scala.

http://www.scala-lang.org/

I firmly belive that Scala will take over from java in the next years.
More info: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/07/scala-replace-java

Re:I hope he has to maintain a legacy Java system

[swilver]

Really? What's it called?

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[Anonymous Coward]

or you could just use Scala

How can he go?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is his notice period? To whom he will do KT (knowledge transfer)???
You won't be relieved and given a Experience letter if you don't complete the above work.

--sh re sh tha

Microsoft Marketeering

[SgtChaireBourne]

Slashdot just became a place for delusional conspiracy theorists.

Nah. That's just Microsoft's outsourced marketeering making its presence known here. They have to throw as many nails in the road in from of Oracl as possible, because Sun's OpenSolaris, Sparc servers, Java, and OpenOffice.org are just the ammo needed to put Microsoft down for good. Sun was in bad shape before Schwartz turned it around, but the timing was unlucky with the economic depression still continuing. Oracle is in a strong position despite the depression.

The truth will set you free.

[heybo]

As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about an anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.

The only harm honesty and truthfulness would bring is showing what lying and thieving asshole Oracle is.
It is wrong to tell the truth and bring harm on others that are harming others with their lies and money?

rename

[krischik]

Ada has a "rename" statement for that. But again, this too can be overused.

The JVM is an Interpreter

[tomhudson]

You need a Java virtual machine (jvm) to run your so-called "compiled code". Why? Because it's not "compiled code" - it's an intermediary representation that the JVM can further interpret and then run.

The concept was not new with Java - pascal used pcode and a pcode interpreter LONG before java saw the light of day - where do you think JG borrowed the idea from? Learn your computer history.

The day you can run Java directly on your os w/o needing a runtime interpreter (same as those old visual basic programs, btw), THEN you can say you have a compiled binary. Until then, the java class files are just bytes to be interpreted by a jvm, not compiled code tht can be executed.

Same as a word processor interprets the bytes in your doc to display your document, same as a web browser interprets html and css and javascript to display a web page.

And I know that "inline" is only a suggestion - and that's because most cpus are register-poor. It's also why I preferred writng in assembler for motorola cpus instead of intel.

If you want to learn interesting things about JIT compilers,

oh lookie - JIT compilers - so java isn't a compiled language after all, is it?

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[terjeber]

You need a Java virtual machine (jvm) to run your so-called "compiled code"

That depends on which Java tool set you use. If you use the Sun Java COMPILER, it does, as you say, COMPILE Java source into bytecode. What happens to that bytecode later again depends on what tools you are using. It is usually either interpreted or compiled into native code, or a combination thereof. On the other hand, if you use the GNU GCJ tool chain, the end result of the compile-asm-link stage is native code. So, as per usual, you are wrong and wrong. Doesn't it get a little embarrassing? Oh, and the ORIGINAL statement of yours was that Java could not be optimized since it was interpreted. Can you please elaborate on why a Java compiler is prevented from producing optimized bytecode?

pascal used pcode and a pcode interpreter

What makes you think I did not know? I once worked on a project that compiled LOGO into p-Code for a p-Machine. It wasn't a great idea for us at the time but it took a while to convince the manager dudes about it. We finally (thankfully) scrapped it.

Oh, and no, p-code wasn't new and the concept wasn't invented for Pascal, as funny enough the article you linked to stated (so your reading comprehension is not too good either) - BCPL was a kind of Basic.

The day you can run Java directly on your os w/o needing a runtime interpreter

Java is a programming language, just like C and Pascal. It can not run on anything. It needs to be TRANSLATED into something so that it can run. This translation process is done by something called a COMPILER. The process is therefore usually termed "to compile". As you say, most (but far from all) Java compilers compile to Sun bytecode, but there are exceptions. The Microsoft Java suite compiles to CIL, which is the MS equivalent. The GNU Java tools compiles to native executables (and therefore lose some Java functionality). All of these products are COMPILERS, the only difference between them is what the compiler outputs. Also, since all of these compilers fundamentally change the Java source code, they can all perform optimizations on the code, such as inlining code. Your moronic statement was that this was not possible.

java class files are just bytes to be interpreted by a jvm, not compiled code

You seem to hold "native code" as equivalent to "compiled code", which is absurd. Something that is compiled is something that has gone through a compiler. What that is really depends. It may be bytecode, it may be another language, it may be (and often is) ASM etc. In the vast majority of cases, what comes out of a compiler will have to be further processed prior to becoming a running program. Even C. ASM and LINK are two cool phases that people who developed for DOS and Windows got intimately familiar with. On Unix very often the output of a compile would be a .o entity. cc -c program.c => program.o (cc -c means "compile only"). Would you be so dumb as to say that cc -c is NOT compilation?

so java isn't a compiled language after all, is it

Yes it is, it is just you who have no clue what a compiler is. Read Louden or Wirth. Please. You are making a fool out of your self.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[tomhudson]

If the end result is a Java class file, then it is NOT compiled code, it is byte code. Get over it. It needs further translation before it can be run.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[terjeber]

If the end result is a Java class file

So you read nothing of what I said and you have not browsed single one of my suggestions? Fine. OK With me. Forget about it, you simply do not have the knowledge and you do not want to acquire it.

This leaves one question un-answered though. Why can one not optimize Java code as it is turned into bytecode? Why can one not optimize bytecode as it is turned into native CPU instructions? That was your original - and massively ignorant - statement.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[tomhudson]

I never said it couldn't be optimized. However, when the JIT is doing this, and caching the resulting native instructions, it is still acting as an interpreter - because Java is not a compiled language, it's interpreted at runtime. That's the basis of its' security model. The security manager has to verify not only that the class file is valid, that the opcodes that are present in the class file are valid opcodes, but also that they are valid IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT, that there is one and only one execution path that can result from that particular sequence of opcodes (fully deterministic).

The only "massively ignorant statements" were from you. Java's security model is entirely dependent on code NOT being in final compiled to native machine code form when the runtime gets it, but in pcode that it can verify. The verifier is designed and written once - for the pcode that is being presented to the virtual machine. Doing all this means that, at the absolute best, any java application will have more overhead than one that is truly compiled once and then distributed as a binary - but which then loses the ability to verify the code, and as such, is obviously no longer a Java application, since it no longer conforms to the specification (and Oracle/Sun will sue you if you try to call it a Java app).

Again - your class file is translated to pcode, an intermediate representation between your source and any final output compiled to native code that the JIT emits. The original idea was that a custom cpu would be made that COULD run the pcode natively, in which case it could be called compiled, but that idea was abandoned early on when the set-top box market hat Java was originally targeted at collapsed. The terminology stuck, unfortunately.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[terjeber]

I never said it couldn't be optimized.

Really? Here is about what transpired, just to jog your memory:
You: To force a function or method call behind the scenes call when a direct assignment to a variable would do DOES add both bloat and reduces performance.
Me: compilers will consequently inline the method, so once your code is compiled, it IS a direct assignment
You: AVA IS NOT A COMPILED LANGUAGE. It's an interpreted language, so your arguments about compiler optimization simply don't apply

But hey, it does explain a lot. Your massive Alzheimer's problem is making it difficult for you to remember anything after 1998.

he verifier is designed and written once - for the pcode that is being presented to the virtual machine

Correct, but that does not prevent the JIT from COMPILING the code into native code at load time. What this means is that you have shifted the code generation away from compile time to load time. This gives you a penalty at LOAD time since the JIT has to compile the pcode (or bytecode as Sun calls it) into native code as it is loading the pcode. Given the fact that the sun bytecode is highly optimized for fast compilation, the overhead in compiling the app at load time rather than at compile time is insignificant.

Again, you have only stated the blatantly obvious, and any time you state that Java is not compiled, and thus can not be optimized, you are making a fool out of your self. Particularly considering that Java in many cases will be faster than C or C++ code.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[tomhudson]

The JIT is a runtime, same as any other runtime. It INTERPRETS the code - in this case class files. Get over it already.

and any time you state that Java is not compiled, and thus can not be optimized

There's a difference between optimizing for the runtime, and optimizing machine code. Go get an education, and a couple of decades of experience, and you'll know the difference. Then again, you may be incapable of learning. However, if you need MORE proof, look at the people who are working on chips to directly run java, without the need for a JVM to interpret the class files.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[terjeber]

Go get an education, and a couple of decades of experience, and you'll know the difference

I have participated in starting a software company, taking it from three starters to fifty employees grown organically and sold to a bigger company, all based on one of the very first commercial Java Enterprise applications ever. I have developed embedded software in C for companies like Sorrento Networks, Cisco, Alcatel and Lucent. I have made a living from software development and related activities since the '80s. For a few years I even worked for IBM. I have worked with Sun long enough to have lamented when they went from BSD to SysV. I have developed software for DEC, Mac and NExT. I am pretty sure I have a lot more varied experience than you. Heck I have even done hardware modifications for a PDP-11 once.

I would assume you are a developer that mostly have developed software for PCs. I might be wrong but only people with a REALLY narrow focus would be as clueless as you.

The JIT is a runtime, same as any other runtime. It INTERPRETS the code

You are astonishingly clueless, and apparently unable to use a search engine: Try this article. I assume you are actually too dumb to click links, here is a quote: "At the time the bytecode is run, the just-in-time compiler will compile some or all of it to native machine code for better performance" (my emphasis). Who is right, the entire world your your dumb ass?

There's a difference between optimizing for the runtime

Again, your SPECIFIC claim was that it was not possible to optimize away getter and setter functions since Java was an interpreted language. Given that Java is COMPILED to bytecode which makes any optimization possible and then again COMPILED to native code by the Just In Time COMPILER which makes it easy, please elaborate. You have so far been unable to do anything relating to your original claim other than denying that you actually made it.

Try this article to learn what a compiler IS. Again, it seems like you are COMPLETELY at odds with the rest of the world. Can you explain why you are right and the rest of the computing world is wrong? Here are some quotes:
While the typical multi-pass compiler outputs machine code from its final pass, there are several other types

• A "source-to-source compiler"
• Stage compiler that compiles to assembly language of a theoretical machine
• Just-in-time compiler, used by Smalltalk and Java systems (my emphasis)
  • Applications are delivered in bytecode, which is compiled to native machine code just prior to execution (my emphasis)

There is also a nice article on Wikipedia about Java compiler. Wonder what that might be... The most common form of output from a Java compiler are Java class files containing platform-neutral Java bytecode. There exist also compilers emitting optimized native machine code for a particular hardware/operating system combination

How about this one? which says: Java source code files (files with a .java extension) are compiled into a format called bytecode. Heck even the DUMBEST computer dictionary on the web gets it right. Even PC Mag gets it right.

There used to be a Java interpreter on the market. It was called Bean Shell, and it interpreted Java code. I have not checked to see if it still exists. Try Google for "Java interpreter".

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[tomhudson]

All of which shows one thing: you can't even read your own examples properly - they back up the claim that java is an interpreted language.

applications are delivered in bytecode, which is compiled to native machine code just prior to execution

The RUNTIME does the compiling, same as the old visual basic or the original pascal interpreters. Your class files are not compiled code - they are pcode.

Pcode is not compiled code, it is source that has been "compiled" to pcode. Quoting what you admit are the dumbest sources around is underwhelming.

Get over it already. Java is not a compiled language - it is interpreted. When you use a 3rd-party product to output a stand-alone executable, you can not call it a Java program - it doesn't conform to the java spec.

Re:The JVM is an Interpreter

[terjeber]

The RUNTIME does the compiling

Correct. It does the COMPILING. Good to see you finally caught on. Now, back to the original statement, even though it is the runtime that does the COMPILING, why does that prevent optimizations?

Pcode is not compiled code

If you wrote the pcode from scratch it is not compiled. If it was the result of a COMPILATION process, it is compiled. Just as your help files, the .chm files on windows are COMPILED help files.

Something is compiled that went through a compiler whether that is C that went through a APD Pascal compiler (output is C), Help files (went through the Microsoft Help compiler) Java bytecode, went through the Java compiler etc. Again, please read up on what a compiler is, I have sent you many, many references that ALL refer to various types of COMPILERS. Including the Java COMPILER - javac.

Java is not a compiled language

And all of the references I sent you, you didn't read A SINGLE ONE of them?

Oh, and why do you refuse to answer the original question here? What is it that prevents Java compiled bytecode to be optimized? What is it that prevents a Java compiler from optimizing prior to turning out bytecode. You are the one that stated Java could not be optimized. Why is that so? Why will you not answer it?

You are wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun was selling the hardware and the expertise to make Java work better on it.

Right now any company worth its salt is running Java on Sun hardware.

Sun's demise had to do more with bda luck, bad timing, and not knowing how to sell themselves.

The technology and the ideas are impecable, so much so that they are used widely right now.

Re:Larry, can we get signed types, properties and

[Anonymous Coward]

Closures are coming to Java 7. Google "project lambda".