Nope, it definitely wasn't an accident so I wasn't implying that. The purposefully did it. Quite why they did it I cannot fathom because it's just hurt and fragmented their developer base that grew to an extremely critical mass during the nineties. Maybe the MSDN guys got greedy and thought they could make money from getting people to rewrite everything, I don't know.
The impression I've always gotten is that, basically, they didn't want to keep supporting it. Maybe not Microsoft-the-entity, but the people who built the tools and things that were used to develop it or that interfaced with it. VB developers may have had no shame for what they were, but I kind of think the guys at Microsoft who were supporting them did (or wanted to build something cooler/better/etc.)
I don't think a desire for rewrites was it -- the old-VB -> VB.NET conversion tool that comes with Visual Studio has exceeded my expectations whenever I've needed to update an old VB project. It's not perfect and it has some blind spots, but it's pretty good for what it is.
I know people sniped at VB, but the fact is that probably billions of lines of code are sitting around written in it and it's the only rapid development platform Microsoft and Windows has. Throwing that away was not a smart move.
I disagree with you here, or maybe we just have different ideas of what RAD is; I don't think throwing together a quick-and-dirty app with, say, modern Visual Studio and VB.NET is measurably harder than doing the same thing with VB6. If anything, out of the box controls have made it even easier -- VB didn't even have a datagrid at all until, what, version 6, and that's something that probably most apps you'd want to RAD would want to use.
Sure, elitist developers (sometimes, I admit, including me) that used to bitch about VBA developers moved to bitching about probably those same people as web developers that just 'slapped a dataset on a page', but I don't think that kind of task got any harder.
FYI, most people don't choose the best programming language for a task based on its originality.
With apologies to Isaac Newton (who himself borrowed the sentiment), If C# sees farther, sure, it's because it stands on the shoulders of giant Java (which stood on the shoulders of giant C++, etc. etc. etc.) -- but it still sees farther.
Where I disagree with you is that you seem to think Microsoft killed old-school VB/VBA development and forced a generation of terrible developers to move, however relucantly, towards object oriented programming by accident.
At one point,.NET was basically just a poor copy of Java -- but then it kept adding features and getting better while once-great Java essentially stagnated.
I agree with your conclusions; it's just my opinion that, in the long run, the cost to Oracle for this lawsuit will be greater than the financial gain by Oracle.
A smarter move, I think, would be to push Java in a hundred ways that don't directly reap revenue (like letting it be the standard for Android development) and then to further refine Java/Oracle integration to the point where using Oracle as your database for a Java project is much faster and easier than anything else.
But then, Oracle has always treated developers like abusive husbands treat the wives they beat.
IMHO, in any practical sense, cheaper/free databases have marginalized Oracle's core business a hundred times more than, say, Linux has ever marginalized Windows as an OS -- and the day that a crack in Oracle's business marketing appears and more business decision makers start to realize this is the beginning of the end for Oracle's core business. Anything Oracle can do to forestall that day, I in Oracle's shoes would do.
The irony now is that it seems Google would've actually been no less safe in creating a C# VM and having that as their development language.
I wish they'd do that now to spite Oracle, because I generally prefer to work in modern C# over modern Java, but I don't have a lot of faith in the success of Windows phones.
Android is actually the thing that spurred me to get my home desktop set up for Java development again. I've done (and sometimes still do) professional work in Java, but there hasn't been anything that seems like fun that I'd want to do with Java for a long time. (YMMV, lots of people like to play around with tech in their spare time that bores the hell out of me and more power to them, etc.)
At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus sources of revenue.
I'd tweak that a bit: they should have taken the bogus revenue, but been wise enough to plan ahead for when it dries up instead of assuming it would continue indefinitely.
If someone wants to pay you $100 for something that's worth $1, by all means take it -- but also understand that, one way or another, that won't continue forever.
Oracle may win in court or force a settlement, but I don't think in the long view they will "win" because of this. Potentially they get some money out of "owning" Java, but they make that property less valuable in the process. Java having been picked for Android development is currently breathing a lot of life into the language -- for a while now Java has been one of the top choices for business app developments, but how long has it been since Java was associated with something cool? And what are the odds it'll be picked for something cool ever again now that people see how litigation-happy Oracle is about it?
Being used for cool, high visibility projects buys language mindshare in a way few things do.
*chop* *cut* There, take that, nose! That'll show my face.
Confidential to mods: Just because something is lower on the page doesn't mean it was posted after other, similar posts. The earliest timestamped post to raise a point can't be redundant.
The worst part about dead people on Facebook is that if you haven't commented on someone's posts for a while and vice versa, Facebook will periodically urge you to 'reconnect' with them.
"Hey, you and DeadSpouse haven't been talking lately. You should post something on their wall."
Technically, there's no reason that bureaucracy couldn't be eliminated when it's no longer needed, even if in practice our government is terrible at doing this.
Meat inspections? Waging war on a grand scale? Roads?
Government isn't a good solution to many problems, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good solution to some problems. A wise society has government as one of the tools in its toolbox, but doesn't try to pound in nails with a wrench either.
Where your logic fails is that "discussion of risks" doesn't take place for almost any other kind of criminal defense.
If I have $100 in my wallet, and you pickpocket me and are caught, your defense lawyer would never in a million years ask why I didn't leave that money at home, or why I didn't have a wallet chain, or aren't I asking for it by having cash instead of writing checks?
If you kill a person in cold blood, your defense lawyer would never try to tell the jury, 'Look, the victim's pretty much an asshole. Maybe he shouldn't have been such an asshole.'
If you're caught shoplifting from a store, your defense lawyer would never say, 'But look at how shitty their security is!'
No, it means exactly what I wrote. I'm not a feminist.
It's not productive to decide what my position is and then read what I wrote through that prism. Legally, we essentially put people on trial for accusing someone else of wrongdoing all the time in ways that don't have a thing to do with gender -- corporate whistleblowers, for example.
To be fair, at one point it was pretty standard to put the accuser in a case like that more on trial than the accused.
Things have swung too far in the opposite direction, now, but you have to understand these things in context -- society's trying to find an appropriate equilibrium.
Really, is anyone surprised that this is Larry Ellison's reaction? (Regardless of the actual details of the allegations or truth of them.)
He's the kind of guy (the bit about him in the Washington Post article linked in TFA speaks to this somewhat, if you're not familiar) who thinks of executives as a kind of new aristocracy, able to do whatever they want and sleep with whichever female employees they want without limit or accountability.
People rag on the quirks tech CEOs like Ballmer and Jobs (and some of it's deserved and/or funny), but Ellison is a honest-to-god king of the douchebags.
So... you're not convinced that Windows is a tech support problem... but in the same post, you express relief that the Windows tech support problems are no longer yours. Seems to me like you need to go get a bandage there, as you've gone and cleanly shot off your own foot.
I'm glad that the Windows tech support problems are no longer mine for a particular user, who now has equal Mac tech support problems.
I'm not entirely sure what the complexity of the game has to do with a comment about hardcore players being willing to pay for it, but alright. Any excuse to bash those damn WoW players, right? If the comparison makes no sense whatsoever I'm sure it's really the fault of those evil guys at Blizzard somehow.
I think he has a legitimate point along with being a little insulting, and you only got the insult part out of it. I'll try to explain what I think the point is:
EVE: A game where losing (in PVP, etc.) has serious consequences. Like RL-months of playing's worth of progress are gone forever kinds of consequences.
WoW: A game where the consequences of losing are pretty negligible.
There are good and bad points to a high risk game. Some people prefer that kind of game, some people prefer to NOT play that kind of game. Point being, people who like EVE probably won't like WoW and vice-versa.
Off the top of my head I can't think of one single thing he did right.
I'm anything but a fan of Bush, but one thing he did right (that's currently topical) was stress in his speeches in the days after 9/11 that just because some Muslims are radical nutjobs does not mean we should treat all Muslims (especially in America) as though they were radical nutjobs.
Contrast that with most of the people angling for GOP presidential canidacy for 2012 and it's not pretty.
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Nope, it definitely wasn't an accident so I wasn't implying that. The purposefully did it. Quite why they did it I cannot fathom because it's just hurt and fragmented their developer base that grew to an extremely critical mass during the nineties. Maybe the MSDN guys got greedy and thought they could make money from getting people to rewrite everything, I don't know.
The impression I've always gotten is that, basically, they didn't want to keep supporting it. Maybe not Microsoft-the-entity, but the people who built the tools and things that were used to develop it or that interfaced with it. VB developers may have had no shame for what they were, but I kind of think the guys at Microsoft who were supporting them did (or wanted to build something cooler/better/etc.)
I don't think a desire for rewrites was it -- the old-VB -> VB.NET conversion tool that comes with Visual Studio has exceeded my expectations whenever I've needed to update an old VB project. It's not perfect and it has some blind spots, but it's pretty good for what it is.
I know people sniped at VB, but the fact is that probably billions of lines of code are sitting around written in it and it's the only rapid development platform Microsoft and Windows has. Throwing that away was not a smart move.
I disagree with you here, or maybe we just have different ideas of what RAD is; I don't think throwing together a quick-and-dirty app with, say, modern Visual Studio and VB.NET is measurably harder than doing the same thing with VB6. If anything, out of the box controls have made it even easier -- VB didn't even have a datagrid at all until, what, version 6, and that's something that probably most apps you'd want to RAD would want to use.
Sure, elitist developers (sometimes, I admit, including me) that used to bitch about VBA developers moved to bitching about probably those same people as web developers that just 'slapped a dataset on a page', but I don't think that kind of task got any harder.
I just need to tell you that it takes more than programming in an object-oriented language to change a programmer's code style.
Absolutely. I didn't say most of them moved very far. :)
FYI, most people don't choose the best programming language for a task based on its originality.
With apologies to Isaac Newton (who himself borrowed the sentiment), If C# sees farther, sure, it's because it stands on the shoulders of giant Java (which stood on the shoulders of giant C++, etc. etc. etc.) -- but it still sees farther.
Where I disagree with you is that you seem to think Microsoft killed old-school VB/VBA development and forced a generation of terrible developers to move, however relucantly, towards object oriented programming by accident.
So what you're saying is... if I want to stay on the cutting edge of development I should... study Britney Spears?
how is .net better than java?
In short, .NET is the Firefox to Java's IE 6.
At one point, .NET was basically just a poor copy of Java -- but then it kept adding features and getting better while once-great Java essentially stagnated.
I agree with your conclusions; it's just my opinion that, in the long run, the cost to Oracle for this lawsuit will be greater than the financial gain by Oracle.
A smarter move, I think, would be to push Java in a hundred ways that don't directly reap revenue (like letting it be the standard for Android development) and then to further refine Java/Oracle integration to the point where using Oracle as your database for a Java project is much faster and easier than anything else.
But then, Oracle has always treated developers like abusive husbands treat the wives they beat.
IMHO, in any practical sense, cheaper/free databases have marginalized Oracle's core business a hundred times more than, say, Linux has ever marginalized Windows as an OS -- and the day that a crack in Oracle's business marketing appears and more business decision makers start to realize this is the beginning of the end for Oracle's core business. Anything Oracle can do to forestall that day, I in Oracle's shoes would do.
The irony now is that it seems Google would've actually been no less safe in creating a C# VM and having that as their development language.
I wish they'd do that now to spite Oracle, because I generally prefer to work in modern C# over modern Java, but I don't have a lot of faith in the success of Windows phones.
Android is actually the thing that spurred me to get my home desktop set up for Java development again. I've done (and sometimes still do) professional work in Java, but there hasn't been anything that seems like fun that I'd want to do with Java for a long time. (YMMV, lots of people like to play around with tech in their spare time that bores the hell out of me and more power to them, etc.)
At the risk of saying the obvious if Yahoo had been looking to please the consumer, and solve a problem that they were having (in regards to finding information on the internet) they could have avoided bogus sources of revenue.
I'd tweak that a bit: they should have taken the bogus revenue, but been wise enough to plan ahead for when it dries up instead of assuming it would continue indefinitely.
If someone wants to pay you $100 for something that's worth $1, by all means take it -- but also understand that, one way or another, that won't continue forever.
Oracle may win in court or force a settlement, but I don't think in the long view they will "win" because of this. Potentially they get some money out of "owning" Java, but they make that property less valuable in the process. Java having been picked for Android development is currently breathing a lot of life into the language -- for a while now Java has been one of the top choices for business app developments, but how long has it been since Java was associated with something cool? And what are the odds it'll be picked for something cool ever again now that people see how litigation-happy Oracle is about it?
Being used for cool, high visibility projects buys language mindshare in a way few things do.
*chop* *cut* There, take that, nose! That'll show my face.
Confidential to mods: Just because something is lower on the page doesn't mean it was posted after other, similar posts. The earliest timestamped post to raise a point can't be redundant.
Yeah, but how valuable is dead person info?
Just as valuable as live person info, if you don't point out the difference to the company you're selling it to.
If Twitter/Facebook remain intentionally ignorant of who's dead, or even just don't put in the effort to determine who is, that's awfully easy.
That's really surreal. I can only imagine what kind of Facebook profile question answers you pick for a dead guy.
"Relationship Status: It's Complicated."
The worst part about dead people on Facebook is that if you haven't commented on someone's posts for a while and vice versa, Facebook will periodically urge you to 'reconnect' with them.
"Hey, you and DeadSpouse haven't been talking lately. You should post something on their wall."
Technically, there's no reason that bureaucracy couldn't be eliminated when it's no longer needed, even if in practice our government is terrible at doing this.
Meat inspections? Waging war on a grand scale? Roads?
Government isn't a good solution to many problems, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good solution to some problems. A wise society has government as one of the tools in its toolbox, but doesn't try to pound in nails with a wrench either.
If you don't like the FCC regulations, write your congressperson, get them changed.
Yup -- and if they won't, run for their office yourself.
A free market can provide choices in some ways; so can a democracy.
I'm glad you asked: More than two at a time is considered gauche. :)
Where your logic fails is that "discussion of risks" doesn't take place for almost any other kind of criminal defense.
If I have $100 in my wallet, and you pickpocket me and are caught, your defense lawyer would never in a million years ask why I didn't leave that money at home, or why I didn't have a wallet chain, or aren't I asking for it by having cash instead of writing checks?
If you kill a person in cold blood, your defense lawyer would never try to tell the jury, 'Look, the victim's pretty much an asshole. Maybe he shouldn't have been such an asshole.'
If you're caught shoplifting from a store, your defense lawyer would never say, 'But look at how shitty their security is!'
No, it means exactly what I wrote. I'm not a feminist.
It's not productive to decide what my position is and then read what I wrote through that prism. Legally, we essentially put people on trial for accusing someone else of wrongdoing all the time in ways that don't have a thing to do with gender -- corporate whistleblowers, for example.
To be fair, at one point it was pretty standard to put the accuser in a case like that more on trial than the accused.
Things have swung too far in the opposite direction, now, but you have to understand these things in context -- society's trying to find an appropriate equilibrium.
Really, is anyone surprised that this is Larry Ellison's reaction? (Regardless of the actual details of the allegations or truth of them.)
He's the kind of guy (the bit about him in the Washington Post article linked in TFA speaks to this somewhat, if you're not familiar) who thinks of executives as a kind of new aristocracy, able to do whatever they want and sleep with whichever female employees they want without limit or accountability.
People rag on the quirks tech CEOs like Ballmer and Jobs (and some of it's deserved and/or funny), but Ellison is a honest-to-god king of the douchebags.
So... you're not convinced that Windows is a tech support problem... but in the same post, you express relief that the Windows tech support problems are no longer yours. Seems to me like you need to go get a bandage there, as you've gone and cleanly shot off your own foot.
I'm glad that the Windows tech support problems are no longer mine for a particular user, who now has equal Mac tech support problems.
I know, reading comprehension is hard.
I'm not entirely sure what the complexity of the game has to do with a comment about hardcore players being willing to pay for it, but alright. Any excuse to bash those damn WoW players, right? If the comparison makes no sense whatsoever I'm sure it's really the fault of those evil guys at Blizzard somehow.
I think he has a legitimate point along with being a little insulting, and you only got the insult part out of it. I'll try to explain what I think the point is:
EVE: A game where losing (in PVP, etc.) has serious consequences. Like RL-months of playing's worth of progress are gone forever kinds of consequences.
WoW: A game where the consequences of losing are pretty negligible.
There are good and bad points to a high risk game. Some people prefer that kind of game, some people prefer to NOT play that kind of game. Point being, people who like EVE probably won't like WoW and vice-versa.
Off the top of my head I can't think of one single thing he did right.
I'm anything but a fan of Bush, but one thing he did right (that's currently topical) was stress in his speeches in the days after 9/11 that just because some Muslims are radical nutjobs does not mean we should treat all Muslims (especially in America) as though they were radical nutjobs.
Contrast that with most of the people angling for GOP presidential canidacy for 2012 and it's not pretty.