"Father of Java" Resigns From Sun/Oracle 396
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.'"
One of Many (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One of Many (Score:5, Interesting)
My bet is he'll be at Google before the end of the year.
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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: (Score:3, Interesting)
C# is very close to Java, especially in spirit, so that does not seem far-fetched at all.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One of Many (Score:4, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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Java is the fat lady these days.
Re:One of Many (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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 ?
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Re:One of Many (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:One of Many (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Come on, you make money on high-end too (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Come on, you make money on high-end too (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 th
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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,
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“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 wi
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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 shor
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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 secr
Re:One of Many (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
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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 [slashdot.org]
Re:One of Many (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunate for us Sun put Java in GPL for us. Oracle can't "undo" that.
Oracle has no interest in crapifying Java (Score:4, Insightful)
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:One of Many (Score:5, Funny)
Continuing the Java tradition, you mean?
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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Presumably w
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Funny)
(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 [wikipedia.org] is to films?
(I'm sorry; I have nothing against Java, but your sentence was just too funny to pass up.)
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I don't mind you making fun of me, but that joke is really lame!
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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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Looking for a job? Get in line, buddy.
Re:Not the best timing (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the best timing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here, I printed my resume on a business card (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Job hunting (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. And it seems these days "Software/Internet Pioneers" have three choices: retire, start a new company, or work at Google.
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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 :)
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He crashed and burned?
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>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 thi
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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?
Farewell sir. (Score:2)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
as a rigger on Ellison's boat.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I really misread your post and at first took it for a GNAA troll.
Any ideas why? (Score:2)
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?
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"artistic differences" (Score:2)
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.
Am I the only one who lol'd at: (Score:2, Funny)
An interesting graphic (Score:5, Interesting)
This from the blog of Gosling, the man himself:
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/so_long_old_friend1 [nighthacks.com]
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Resigned or was fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Larry Ellison has already stated [informationweek.com] 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 [oracle.com]. They paid 8.5B for BEA [redherring.com] just to have a leading Java enterprise stack; do you really think they'd have fired Gosling when they consider Java that strategic?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 c
Not a big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 mo
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Look up a guy by the name of Drew Major.
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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.
it's not too late (Score:5, Funny)
for him to brush up on his vb.net skills
and maybe he should get some ms access experience
I never could understand Java (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I never could understand Java (Score:4, Funny)
Do you prefer Perl, $@%#&?
Oh good grief... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Perhaps now he can admit a few mistakes in Java (Score:2)
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... 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.
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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 d
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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: (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
He will be missed. One question though. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
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They asked for his help but he refused to even give any pointers.
Re:He will be missed. One question though. (Score:5, Funny)
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:He will be missed. One question though. (Score:5, Funny)
java.lang.PointersAreNotAllowedException
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Bye Bye, Java Patriarch. Goodbye, Mr Coffee (Score:2)
Larry, can we get signed types, properties and clo (Score:4, Insightful)
Larry, can we get signed types, properties and closures now, please?
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Re:bad (Score:5, Funny)
Re:bad (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah but he doesn't have a freezer full of Whoppers
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But then Anders Hejlsberg will have him encased in carbonite and mounted on his office wall as a trophy.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Really? What's it called?