"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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[X0563511]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Not the best timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking for a job? Get in line, buddy.

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

[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.

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

[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?

Maybe he can find work

[Megaweapon]

as a rigger on Ellison's boat.

Re:Maybe he can find work

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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...

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.

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

[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.

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

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:bad

[timmarhy]

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

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?

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.

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

[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.

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

[Hal_Porter]

Java is the fat lady these days.

Re:bad

[Hal_Porter]

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

Re:Microsoft

[Hal_Porter]

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

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.

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.

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.

[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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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.

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: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: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?

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

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

[swilver]

Really? What's it called?