Look at what MS is doing to folks build android handsets.
So you use Java, you still have both Microsoft and Oracle going after you. Obviously, using Java didn't help one bit.
Actually, if Android were based on Mono, there'd be less of a problem because Microsoft's legal commitments regarding Mono are much broader than Sun/Oracle's legal commitments regarding Java.
Do you not think it exists solely to get MS patents into the free software ecosystem?
And which patents would that be? Nobody has been able to show a single essential patent necessary for implementing core C#, and yet Microsoft also made a legally binding commitment.
For Java, not only are there dozens of essential patents, we've known about them for years, and Sun/Oracle explicitly doesn't license them. And Sun/Oracle has successfully poisoned the open source ecosystem with their fake open source software.
Do you think MS is just going to let it thrive ever?
Both Oracle and Microsoft are totally untrustworthy and evil; however, if I have to deal with evil companies, I prefer to do it with some legal protections, and Microsoft offers those while Oracle doesn't.
Obviously, Java isn't free, as Oracle's lawsuit shows. As for hiring, yeah, you get your pick of 100 people, 97 of which are no good. In the end, you're no better off than if you pick some more obscure language.
The only people for who "I get tons of applicants" really works is very large companies, who have the resources to sift through all of them and the management structure to manage dozens of mediocre programmers to squeeze something out of them.
The headers haven't been "removed" since the file is clearly not a copy. The file does appear to have been derived from Sun's source file, but not necessarily in a way that violates copyright.
Except... that they may not even be distributing the code: just because a class is included in the Android source distribution doesn't mean that it's installed on handsets. Some of the classes may just be there for testing.
So, you really think that HYPE has been powering enterprise for the last 15 years? Man, HYPE is pretty damn effective
This surprises you? Many of the enterprises using Java needed to be bailed out because they couldn't even keep their finances straight or make responsible loans. Many of these enterprises have huge cost overruns on their IT projects. Large enterprises primarily select languages based on long-term support, vendor support, interoperability, and programmer availability, not quality; they don't have a choice.
As I was saying: C++ and Java are both widely used commercial languages with tons of "whizzy features" and "buzzword compliance" designed into them by academics.
Funny thing is that you do exactly what you accuse other people of doing: you go for whizzy academic features and buzzwords.
Well, I don't know the entire complaint. But I did check on the PolicyNodeImpl.java file. That code was released by Sun under the GPL with the classpath exception; it isn't proprietary source code. At worst, Google would be guilty of a GPL violation by changing the license. But that's not even what's going on. Google isn't shipping the code as part of Android, the shipped it as part of a test package. Furthermore, that code appears to have to reuse even private variable names because those appear to be accessed via reflection by something.
In general, APIs shouldn't be, and aren't, copyrightable. And since in Java, even private members form part of the API (due to reflection), Oracle really has no leg to stand on in claiming copyright over their choice of private variable names.
It's not arrogance to point out the historical fact that Europe has been incapable of keeping its own political house in order: fascism, communism, two world wars, colonialism, massive religious and ethnic conflicts, genocide, to name just a few. And the trouble is that Europeans just don't learn and are heading for totalitarianism again, all the while believing themselves to be superior to everybody else in the world.
I am not comparing Europe to the US specifically; you simply expressed European arrogance towards the US on this instance. But Europeans, in general, are arrogant towards, and ignorant of, the entire rest of the world, not just the US.
I would never call you a "fucking scumbag", but I will call you an ignorant, uneducated lout.
You're still trying to defend your idiotic, indefensible statement that "ALL toolkits use it because interface to X is de-facto standardized on level of Xlib"? What are you smoking? The Wikipedia entry you yourself pointed to proves you wrong, since there is already another C library, XCB.
Likewise I know for a fact that Sun's Java uses the Xlib. Perl and Python rely on toolkits and are oblivious to the OS or graphics system one runs (== use Xlib).
The fact that you can use Xlib from some of those languages doesn't mean that there aren't other bindings as well. (And you totally misunderstood the embedded comment; not much experience there, eh?)
99.9% of rendering of modern Qt and GTK applications happens inside the client, not on server,
You're stating the obvious.
only ready-to-display images are transferred to the X server. Logical question arises: why we need to transfer that stuff to server at all?
However you want to get those pixels onto the screen, X11 supports it: you can use shared memory, IPC, direct graphics. Wayland doesn't improve on any of that.
I ask you again: what specific problem is Wayland solving? How does it make the user interface meaningfully faster, more usable, or easier to program? Simplification of an architectural diagram is not enough reason to break compatibility and start over from scratch.
What Wayland will do is push window management into the toolkits, make the server less modular, and (apparently) push more functionality into the kernel, all of which are big negatives.
Being a good language is about getting stuff done not being buzzword compliant or "state of the art". If you judge the worth of a programming language by how cool it is rather than how useful then I'd say you're not the target market for Java anyway. It's used to actually make large stable systems, not for being pretentious about what whizzy features your language supports. I think that C was a very similar language - not at all the kind of thing that pretentious academic wankers would write papers about, but very good for getting stuff done. I'm a doer, not a wanker. I suspect that I know what camp you're in.
But that's what Java and C++ are: languages bloated by "whizzy features" and "buzzword compliance". Look at the people who designed many of the recent C++ and Java language features and the Java libraries: it's a lot of "academic wankers" (your words) who had failed to push their language features in their own obscure languages and then got hired by Sun and pushed their untested academic crap into the Java language and the libraries.
And the reason you use it is not because you know any better or have any first-hand reason to believe that it's more productive (your list of languages says that you don't), it's because those same "pretentious academic wankers" taught them to millions of students who then went into industry and set the current de-facto standards.
Would I prefer to use Java over JavaScript, C, or C++? You bet. But that doesn't make any of those languages well-designed.
Yeah, typical European attitude: keep laughing until the continent erupts in war and chaos again, as it typically does about once a century.
Given Europe's history of two millennia genocide, religious wars, colonialism, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism, you'd think Europeans would start exercising a bit of humility. But arrogance seems to be part of the European package.
You do not know what you are talking about. ALL toolkits use it because interface to X is de-facto standardized on level of Xlib (and de jure via LSB on Linux), not the network protocol.
Sorry, but you're wrong, and you don't understand what that Wikipedia page is saying.
There have been X client libraries not based on xlib, for example for Java, ML, Lisp, Python, Perl, and many other languages. A lot of embedded software stacks use their own X11 protocol implementations. There is even a new protocol implementation for C called XCB that will hopefully replace xlib (xlib will run on top of it for backwards compatibility). In addition to all that, there are many tools that speak the X protocol directly. Heck, I've written my own X client library; it's not rocket science.
Ubuntu may be able to move a large number of desktop users to Wayland, but at the cost of splitting the UNIX/Linux community by making Ubuntu's X11 implementation effectively as crappy as running X11 on Windows or OS X. That might be a reasonable thing to do if there were significant gains in performance or usability to be expected, but there won't be. Wayland won't be any faster, any easier to program, or any easier to use than the current X11-based systems; to the contrary, a lot of things will end up being harder to do and less consistent than on current X11-based systems.
Ask anybody who programmed using Xlib and you would
Where did I say that you should program in Xlib? Xlib is totally irrelevant. Xlib is merely a crappy and obsolete C library that gives you access to the protocol. Many toolkits don't use it.
What matters is the protocol itself and the common standard by which different toolkits interact with the server, the window manager, and each other.
be immediately advised to use GTK/Qt/wxWidgets/etc instead.
Yes, and if we keep going down this path, the only toolkits you will be able to use are Gtk+ and Qt and things built on them, and that's bad.
Note that there's also the double buffer extension, which used to be frequently used with the synchronization extension. The shared memory extension was also around very early. X11 has pretty much everything a modern window system needs for more than two decades.
(I think modern monitor technologies make this stuff increasingly irrelevant.)
Why don't you provide a citation for your implicit claim that American security is "brainless", and the implication that Canada and Europe are superior?
Strangely I hate the idea of domestic wiretapping, but if it's happening here and I don't know about it, I don't feel it as an invasion of my privacy.
Well, I'm sorry, but open up a newspaper sometime. Furthermore, you'll simply not know about most successful invasions of privacy by governments, but you will still suffer their effects.
But if it means there are no stupid "show/let some fat dude grope your penis to get to the plane" procedures, I'm all for it. Better real security than security theatre!
Which only goes to show that Europeans like you have apparently learned nothing from the past few centuries. As Franklin said: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Well, fortunately, Java seems to be self-destructing and spinning out of control, adding legal and community troubles to its technical problems. Maybe in another decade or so, it will be about as relevant to mainstream computing as COBOL.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, there would have to be any actual patent infringement in the first place...
Look at what MS is doing to folks build android handsets.
So you use Java, you still have both Microsoft and Oracle going after you. Obviously, using Java didn't help one bit.
Actually, if Android were based on Mono, there'd be less of a problem because Microsoft's legal commitments regarding Mono are much broader than Sun/Oracle's legal commitments regarding Java.
Do you not think it exists solely to get MS patents into the free software ecosystem?
And which patents would that be? Nobody has been able to show a single essential patent necessary for implementing core C#, and yet Microsoft also made a legally binding commitment.
For Java, not only are there dozens of essential patents, we've known about them for years, and Sun/Oracle explicitly doesn't license them. And Sun/Oracle has successfully poisoned the open source ecosystem with their fake open source software.
Do you think MS is just going to let it thrive ever?
Both Oracle and Microsoft are totally untrustworthy and evil; however, if I have to deal with evil companies, I prefer to do it with some legal protections, and Microsoft offers those while Oracle doesn't.
C# is tied to a single OS. That makes it a nonstarter right there.
Runs fine on my Linux box.
Mono is not a portable version, it is like its namesake a disease. Meant to poison the well that is Free Software.
Funny, given Sun's/Oracle's patent pool and litigiousness, I think it's quite clear that Java is "meant to poison the well that is Free Software".
"Open source" Java developers have never cared about this stuff. They were Sun's lapdogs, and they will be Oracle's lapdogs.
FORTRAN wasn't a viable alternative to COBOL in the business world for technical reasons.
Obviously, Java isn't free, as Oracle's lawsuit shows. As for hiring, yeah, you get your pick of 100 people, 97 of which are no good. In the end, you're no better off than if you pick some more obscure language.
The only people for who "I get tons of applicants" really works is very large companies, who have the resources to sift through all of them and the management structure to manage dozens of mediocre programmers to squeeze something out of them.
Good CS graduates have options, you know.
The headers haven't been "removed" since the file is clearly not a copy. The file does appear to have been derived from Sun's source file, but not necessarily in a way that violates copyright.
Except... that they may not even be distributing the code: just because a class is included in the Android source distribution doesn't mean that it's installed on handsets. Some of the classes may just be there for testing.
Oracle wouldn't be getting a license fee; people would just remove whatever Oracle has a valid patent claim on.
So, you really think that HYPE has been powering enterprise for the last 15 years? Man, HYPE is pretty damn effective
This surprises you? Many of the enterprises using Java needed to be bailed out because they couldn't even keep their finances straight or make responsible loans. Many of these enterprises have huge cost overruns on their IT projects. Large enterprises primarily select languages based on long-term support, vendor support, interoperability, and programmer availability, not quality; they don't have a choice.
C++ is an academic language???
As I was saying: C++ and Java are both widely used commercial languages with tons of "whizzy features" and "buzzword compliance" designed into them by academics.
Funny thing is that you do exactly what you accuse other people of doing: you go for whizzy academic features and buzzwords.
Well, I don't know the entire complaint. But I did check on the PolicyNodeImpl.java file. That code was released by Sun under the GPL with the classpath exception; it isn't proprietary source code. At worst, Google would be guilty of a GPL violation by changing the license. But that's not even what's going on. Google isn't shipping the code as part of Android, the shipped it as part of a test package. Furthermore, that code appears to have to reuse even private variable names because those appear to be accessed via reflection by something.
In general, APIs shouldn't be, and aren't, copyrightable. And since in Java, even private members form part of the API (due to reflection), Oracle really has no leg to stand on in claiming copyright over their choice of private variable names.
It's not arrogance to point out the historical fact that Europe has been incapable of keeping its own political house in order: fascism, communism, two world wars, colonialism, massive religious and ethnic conflicts, genocide, to name just a few. And the trouble is that Europeans just don't learn and are heading for totalitarianism again, all the while believing themselves to be superior to everybody else in the world.
I am not comparing Europe to the US specifically; you simply expressed European arrogance towards the US on this instance. But Europeans, in general, are arrogant towards, and ignorant of, the entire rest of the world, not just the US.
I would never call you a "fucking scumbag", but I will call you an ignorant, uneducated lout.
Your signature says otherwise: the hype and lies about Java are obviously continuing, courtesy of its large army of fanboys.
I'm not sure what you are smoking.
You're still trying to defend your idiotic, indefensible statement that "ALL toolkits use it because interface to X is de-facto standardized on level of Xlib"? What are you smoking? The Wikipedia entry you yourself pointed to proves you wrong, since there is already another C library, XCB.
Likewise I know for a fact that Sun's Java uses the Xlib. Perl and Python rely on toolkits and are oblivious to the OS or graphics system one runs (== use Xlib).
The fact that you can use Xlib from some of those languages doesn't mean that there aren't other bindings as well. (And you totally misunderstood the embedded comment; not much experience there, eh?)
99.9% of rendering of modern Qt and GTK applications happens inside the client, not on server,
You're stating the obvious.
only ready-to-display images are transferred to the X server. Logical question arises: why we need to transfer that stuff to server at all?
However you want to get those pixels onto the screen, X11 supports it: you can use shared memory, IPC, direct graphics. Wayland doesn't improve on any of that.
I ask you again: what specific problem is Wayland solving? How does it make the user interface meaningfully faster, more usable, or easier to program? Simplification of an architectural diagram is not enough reason to break compatibility and start over from scratch.
What Wayland will do is push window management into the toolkits, make the server less modular, and (apparently) push more functionality into the kernel, all of which are big negatives.
That's a funny statement about a language that succeeded because of extreme hype and buzzwords.
Being a good language is about getting stuff done not being buzzword compliant or "state of the art". If you judge the worth of a programming language by how cool it is rather than how useful then I'd say you're not the target market for Java anyway. It's used to actually make large stable systems, not for being pretentious about what whizzy features your language supports. I think that C was a very similar language - not at all the kind of thing that pretentious academic wankers would write papers about, but very good for getting stuff done. I'm a doer, not a wanker. I suspect that I know what camp you're in.
But that's what Java and C++ are: languages bloated by "whizzy features" and "buzzword compliance". Look at the people who designed many of the recent C++ and Java language features and the Java libraries: it's a lot of "academic wankers" (your words) who had failed to push their language features in their own obscure languages and then got hired by Sun and pushed their untested academic crap into the Java language and the libraries.
And the reason you use it is not because you know any better or have any first-hand reason to believe that it's more productive (your list of languages says that you don't), it's because those same "pretentious academic wankers" taught them to millions of students who then went into industry and set the current de-facto standards.
Would I prefer to use Java over JavaScript, C, or C++? You bet. But that doesn't make any of those languages well-designed.
Yeah, typical European attitude: keep laughing until the continent erupts in war and chaos again, as it typically does about once a century.
Given Europe's history of two millennia genocide, religious wars, colonialism, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism, you'd think Europeans would start exercising a bit of humility. But arrogance seems to be part of the European package.
You do not know what you are talking about. ALL toolkits use it because interface to X is de-facto standardized on level of Xlib (and de jure via LSB on Linux), not the network protocol.
Sorry, but you're wrong, and you don't understand what that Wikipedia page is saying.
There have been X client libraries not based on xlib, for example for Java, ML, Lisp, Python, Perl, and many other languages. A lot of embedded software stacks use their own X11 protocol implementations. There is even a new protocol implementation for C called XCB that will hopefully replace xlib (xlib will run on top of it for backwards compatibility). In addition to all that, there are many tools that speak the X protocol directly. Heck, I've written my own X client library; it's not rocket science.
Ubuntu may be able to move a large number of desktop users to Wayland, but at the cost of splitting the UNIX/Linux community by making Ubuntu's X11 implementation effectively as crappy as running X11 on Windows or OS X. That might be a reasonable thing to do if there were significant gains in performance or usability to be expected, but there won't be. Wayland won't be any faster, any easier to program, or any easier to use than the current X11-based systems; to the contrary, a lot of things will end up being harder to do and less consistent than on current X11-based systems.
Ask anybody who programmed using Xlib and you would
Where did I say that you should program in Xlib? Xlib is totally irrelevant. Xlib is merely a crappy and obsolete C library that gives you access to the protocol. Many toolkits don't use it.
What matters is the protocol itself and the common standard by which different toolkits interact with the server, the window manager, and each other.
be immediately advised to use GTK/Qt/wxWidgets/etc instead.
Yes, and if we keep going down this path, the only toolkits you will be able to use are Gtk+ and Qt and things built on them, and that's bad.
Note that there's also the double buffer extension, which used to be frequently used with the synchronization extension. The shared memory extension was also around very early. X11 has pretty much everything a modern window system needs for more than two decades.
(I think modern monitor technologies make this stuff increasingly irrelevant.)
[citation needed]
Why don't you provide a citation for your implicit claim that American security is "brainless", and the implication that Canada and Europe are superior?
Strangely I hate the idea of domestic wiretapping, but if it's happening here and I don't know about it, I don't feel it as an invasion of my privacy.
Well, I'm sorry, but open up a newspaper sometime. Furthermore, you'll simply not know about most successful invasions of privacy by governments, but you will still suffer their effects.
But if it means there are no stupid "show/let some fat dude grope your penis to get to the plane" procedures, I'm all for it. Better real security than security theatre!
Which only goes to show that Europeans like you have apparently learned nothing from the past few centuries. As Franklin said: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Well, fortunately, Java seems to be self-destructing and spinning out of control, adding legal and community troubles to its technical problems. Maybe in another decade or so, it will be about as relevant to mainstream computing as COBOL.