Java Creator James Gosling Hired At Google 229
jfruhlinger writes "Some months after leaving Oracle in a huff, father of Java James Gosling has joined Google. It's not clear what his job responsibilities will be there, but given some of his past statements about Google projects — that Android has no adult supervision, for instance — it will be interesting to see what develops."
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
"Some months after leaving Oracle in a huff, father of Java James Gosling has joined Google. It's not clear what his job responsibilities will be there..".
Maybe Google thought things were just moving too quickly.
Really? (Score:3, Informative)
We were panicked about C# a while ago. And we've gotten somewhat more relaxed about it. It's certainly something to be concerned about, given the amount of resources Microsoft can bring to bear. But I've had conversations with developers. It has not been that big an issue with developers. It's actually been much more a public relations issue than a reality issue. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082-817522.html#ixzz1HumJH5sb [cnet.com]
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
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In any case, C# really was much more similar to Java in 2002 than it is today. Back then, the type systems were essentially identical, and the few things that you've got from C# were syntactic sugar for properties & evens, attributes (what Java later called "annotations"), enums, unsigned types, and unsafe code (raw unchecked pointers with arithmetic) when you need it. Not that it's a short list, but I don't think that it was that big of a deal.
Since then things have changed a lot, largely because the p
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think he made it clear that Oracle significantly cut his salary. Most employees would leave for greener pastures in that situation.
James Gosling also said that his position was lower in the company (in spite of holding the same job title), that Oracle micromanages everyone and doesn't allow them to make any important decisions, and that they made him into little more than a cheerleader for Java. So by his account, things sucked all the way around.
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Dude, I get panicked ... when a dictatorship rises in my neyborhood.
Oh, you have an HOA? I hate those too.
Gosling's child instances, thus-- (Score:2)
Still in the News? (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this guy still in the news?
I get it - he's a douche, and his wife Kate is an overbearing bitch, and all they both care about is making money (over $1,000,000 per episode) off of their litter.
Who cares if their kids get psychologically ruined? I mean, it's not like they had a chance to become productive, sane members of society with those two as parents anyway.
In a perfect world, they'd be in jail and the kids would be adopted.
But no, now this guy is being given a cushy job at Google, for what? Java?
Please, that's what Amazon Mechanical Turk is for.
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Finally a voice of reason in this terrifically difficult to understand situation
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He's talking about John Gosling, from John and Kate Plus 8
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I think it must be a reference to a TV show that only screens in the US.
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I think it must be a reference to a TV show that only screens in the US.
I wish it only screened in the US.
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Google v. Oracle - Solved (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wasn't aware that Google was involved in JavaEE in any way.
Or did you mean "current popular technology?"
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As a developer with experience in both C# and Java, C# is the spiritual sequel to J++. It was MS' answer to the then-war with Sun over Java on Windows, and a sad effort at that. A language tied directly to a single OS = BAD. As a Java coder, I can get a job developing on desktop PCs, Web applications, smartphones, Blu-Ray players and TVs, or Martian rovers.
C# is tied to one OS? Huh, I guess no one bothered to tell the guys that make Unity [unity3d.com] that, seeing how their product uses C# and is cross platform.
Re:Google v. Oracle - Solved (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Google v. Oracle - Solved (Score:4, Informative)
Gosling will be able to easily ensure that Google's Android code base is free of anything Oracle's disputing.
Which changes nothing. Odds are that Android was already carefully screened to be free of Oracle contamination, but Oracle sued anyway. That's just Oracle culture.
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Wtf? No polymorphism on the basic types perhaps, but it's an OO language enough for polymorphism on the objects you instantiate.
Be more precise!
Oddly the strong typing with 'real rules and structure' is why I like it as a commercial development language. Most programmers lack software engineering skills so a language that constrains them a little saves a massive amount of bug hunting and regression testing down the line.
At home I use more interesting languages..
My favorite Gosling quote (Score:5, Interesting)
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That sounds more like something Stoustrup would say.
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It is more something that the software designers say in general .:
The worst thing that can happen to a < T extends Code > you create is that people start to use it
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obvious but probably not helpful (Score:2, Interesting)
Gosling going to Google is an obvious choice. However, I seriously doubt he has anything to contribute other than name recognition. Gosling did a piss poor job on the design and evolution of Java to begin with.
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I think some of the decisions were forced by the marketing division, who were in a hurry to release the language. Marketing was probably right though, given the success of the language, warts be damned.
Re:obvious but probably not helpful (Score:4, Interesting)
How so? I thought it was generally consider a pretty decent job, and not just due to actual success of the platform and language. While Java has its quirks like any other programming language, it seems pretty well-rounded and practical. Your statement would suggest much more than that, so what exact things back up your statement?
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Java's design had a whole bunch of problems that a competent language designer in the 1990's should have been able to avoid (in the object system, number system, error handling, etc.), given that there was almost nothing new in Java. So, in that sense, Gosling did a piss poor job. Java itself still ended up being a significant improvement over C/C++ for most people, simply because C/C++ set the bar so low.
(Many of these problems with Java then got fixed by an army of language lawyers and specialists. Unf
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At the time Java was up against C, C++, VB and Delphi as the key development languages off mainframe.
I'd say that by v1.1 and definitely by v1.2 it was more usable with better features than all of those as a server-side development language.
J2EE replaced CORBA and led to the dominance of Java app servers as the server-side platform of choice for many companies.
Even app vendors switched to it, unless they were specifically targeting the mainframe or Windows..
Other markets (device drivers, embedded systems, d
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Yeah, because we all know: what's popular is obviously well designed! Just look at Windows, or McDonalds for that matter.
No wonder you signed your post "Moron".
Google's arsenal of programming language people (Score:5, Informative)
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Turn in thy geek card good sir.
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Wow. I hadn't seen it tallied up like that.
*Banging on Google's door*
Let me in! Let me in! I want off this rock!
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The fact that they've got both Bloch and now Gosling is particularly interesting. I wonder if Google will have the balls (or be forced to, by the ongoing legal action) to fork Java into their own project. It has been stagnating for a while now with little development other than "enterprisey" server-side stuff, and it would be nice if some people who are good at it could pick it up and drive it in "release early, release often" fashion. That, and none of that Oracle patent bullshit.
Google now has Gosling (Java) and Guido (Python) (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Gosling, he's a good guy and he asks great questions.
I'm hoping this means more focus on AppEngine. It supports a Python or Java API. (I prefer Python) It's a very cool place to build things. I just built a small multi-vendor site for our local makers and crafters and had a blast doing it.
disclaimer: I used to work for Sun in the Java Center.
He also calls Android a Dogs Breakfast (Score:2)
He seems an interesting guy, obviously brilliant, but his broad view arrows miss their target by a long way.
For example, in the same interview, he questions the free cost of Android. Its easy to assume the reasons, and this was shored up with the "Castle and moat" scenario put forward a few days back. It should have been obvious to him.
Gosling also says he "hopes not to be pulled into th
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And this is a problem because?
Look, if he thinks Android sucks balls AND can make it better, why complain?
It's not like being an employee means you have to tow the company line.
Besides, the Castle and Moat scenario basically said to me that Google cares more about making money off me by selling my eyeballs than it does making a product that's well polished. It's the "we're done when it's good enough" condition that resulted in Windows being the primary computing OS.
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At the time Sun who $$$ paid $$$ him to give any possible objection he could to the android platform. I don't know if that was an honest opinion or not. Besides, now that he is in the camp and can offer "influence", he might like it far better.
Go James Go Lang :-) (Score:2)
I guess he will write an emacs clone in GoLang :-)
(ok it's a joke, and linked to the fact that although I'm regular emacs user planning to grow a sixt finger "RSN"... I'm not super fan of Java...
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I guess he will write an emacs clone in GoLang :-)
I think it's called Eclipse.
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You are almost right, these people are actually choosing gedit or notepad although vim and emacs are avaiable ....
Basically in many countries studying computer science is avoiding one "small" issue, code is supposed to really work...
So many developpers know how to shovel out some more or less complex code, and it works just long enough to get the credit...
But then they completelly forget about it, so they like an IDE that "remembers" so they do not have too.
But they lack the practice, and the curiosity to l
Did they ask him.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Did they ask him.. (Score:4, Funny)
No, they probably asked him the difference between Final, Finally and Finalize in Java...
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The correct answer, of course, is that there isn't any - all are valid identifiers not used in any way either by the language nor by the standard class library. ~
(what with Java being case sensitive)
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Yes. He wrote out the byte code to do it.
In case someone files suit against Google.... (Score:2)
... over java, they can see - "Lets just ask the man who invented Java"
Re:Java (Score:5, Insightful)
Java is a fine language that not only is widely used in a lot of different settings (like, er, Android), but which clearly inspired C#. Without Java C# wouldn't exist, nor would its runtime library so closely mimic Java's.
The other thing to be admired about Java is it brought us the JVM, which hosts fine languages such as Scala and Gosu. Because of the widespread support Java enjoys, the JVM implementations have explored groundbreaking improvements in garbage collection performance, multithreading, IPC techniques and so on.
C#, on the other hand, is directly tied to Windows and will thus continue its descent into irrelevance. Perhaps Mono will start to get traction at some point, but many are wary of possible patent issues.
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the JVM implementations have explored groundbreaking improvements in garbage collection performance, multithreading, IPC techniques and so on.
Okay, I'll give you gc, but multi-threading and IPC? I do Java and I'm completely unaware of anything they innovated here.
Really, Java's claim to fame is hot JITing and GC'ing. Outside of those, I'm not aware of anything Java innovated.
Re:Java (Score:5, Insightful)
And MS-PL is not compatible with the GPL. If Microsoft really wanted to join hands with the Open Source community they wouldn't have deliberately created a license that is incompatible with the way the vast, vast majority of Open Source projects are licensed. I ignore their words. When I listen to their actions, the message is that they want to make a token gesture of openness that has severely limited practical use while discouraging community forks, all of which serves to make it possible for them to regain complete control if they later change their mind.
It's amazing how effective token gestures like this are, how impressed by them people can be. Really it's business as usual: if you want to actually benefit from the source they have provided you either do it Microsoft's way or you don't get to do it at all. Source that an Open Source developer can't use in their existing GPL projects may as well be closed source. Nowhere in here do you find any sort of community spirit, a cherishing of "free as in speech", an appreciation of compatibility, or a willingness to deal with the many Open Source developers as equals. It's either the Microsoft Way or the highway and that's why .Net is something I can easily live without, however convenient it may be.
No, they usually wait until it becomes much more widespread and ubiquitous before they do that. They're too smart to stop playing nice this early on. A wolf in sheep's clothing doesn't reveal his fangs until he's well within the flock of sheep. They use underhanded techniques like this again and again because they work, because so many fools still don't see it coming after so many examples. Anyone who doesn't understand that this is the way Microsoft operates is either ignorant about their history and the way it repeats itself, a marketer/shill, or just plain naive.
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Ms-PL is a BSD-style license which has a "patent nuke clause" in it (if you sue over a patent, your rights are terminated). Many anti-patent people consider such clauses (which are not unique to Ms-PL; for example, OSL by OSI also included such a clause) to be a good thing. From that perspective, the fact that GPL is incompatible with such a license is a deficiency in GPL.
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And MS-PL is not compatible with the GPL.
So? Open Source isn't defined by the GPL and the GPL means changing your values to suit the GPL's license restrictions, something less restrictive like BSD or MIT allow you to be open but don't force you into accepting the GPL values.
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+1
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Funny thing about your complaints is the fact that the GPL crowd reaps code from BSD licensed works, yet, magically does not give back any BSD code.
Nice, insinuating my entitlement mentality when the GPL crowd regularly resorts to propaganda and tries to bully other people and/or companies into giving away their intellectual property for free.
It looks like YOU have an unreasonable entitlement mentality that does not permit other people to have an opinion.
Re:Java (Score:4, Insightful)
If the GPL crowd wanted to join hands with the Open Source Community they would have made their license compatible with the Mit License
which is free as in free and does not try to shove it down our throats like the brain washed/dead cult called GPL.
This is a classic troll that gets rehashed from time to time. That's because those who are willing to value what the GPL does (i.e. the overwhelming majority of all Open Source developers and users) already do so. Those who do not like the GPL have a different set of needs and values and cannot be convinced unless those needs and values change. Of course you knew that, and were counting on the irreconcilability of the positions to troll the more reactive types.
I for one appreciate what the GPL does. Really the only people who would have a solid reason to dislike the GPL are those with a strong desire to use someone else's work without ever having to contribute anything in return. I don't have that desire and I reject the entitlement mentality that would cause it. Those developers who want you to be able to do that with their hard work can always use a BSD-style license. Those who don't want you to be able to do that never owed you anything in the first place and their wishes should be respected.
I do not believe it's a concidence that Open Source as a movement was never anything the average user might have heard of until the GPL. Yes, the BSD license and those like it have been around for much longer, but for a long time they were something with which only geeks would be familiar. Nor do I think it's a coincidence that the most famous and widely-used Open Source software, such as Firefox, Linux, etc. are all GPL licensed.
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Really the only people who would have a solid reason to dislike the GPL are those with a strong desire to use someone else's work without ever having to contribute anything in return.
Or anyone writing open source code that wants to use both a GPL library and a library with an incompatible open source licence. Eg, you cannot combine GPLv2 code with GPLv3 code [gnu.org], and there are many more incompatible open source licences.
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There exists a thing called Open Specification Promise, which is basically a pledge by MS not to sue conformant implementations of some specific standards that it has published. Despite the "promise" name, it is in fact legally binding.
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http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
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You are indeed correct, and I confused two similar but different things - my apologies. C# and CLR are covered by Microsoft Community Promise [microsoft.com]. The difference between OSP and CP is described as such on the latter's FAQ:
Q: How is the Community Promise (CP) different from the Open Specification Promise (OSP)?
A: The CP requires that implementations conform to all of required parts of the mandatory portions of the specification.
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Yeah, I pointed out some alternate accounts to the OP of this thread and I think it upset the machine so they need to bury me ASAP:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2057736&cid=35642308 [slashdot.org]
It's not like it wasn't obvious.
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Guess I learned my lesson... don't defend Microsoft on /.
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Actually, I think the problem is the Anti-MS trolls and the MS trolls couldn't work out whose side you were on there, resulting in the creation of a paradox which inevitably collapses into a "-1; Flamebait".
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"Isn't Google getting sued by Oracle, the owner of Java for a re-implementation.
What Google's getting sued for is specifically legal and encouraged with C#."
Is there an *irrevocable*, universal, comprehensive, royalty-free patent grant to all reimplementors of C# for past, present and all future versions?
If not, then anybody is just as sueable as with Java.
Re:Lisp (Score:2)
What?
LISP is dead simple.
Evaluate arguments, apply symbolized function to arguments.
Compose these function evaluations if you feel like it.
I got the impression people didn't like LISP because of the parentheses, to which I can only say
"if so, why are you programmer". If indented properly, LISP is the most elegant looking and easy
to understand programming language I've ever encountered. The flexibility in LISP comes from the
fact that it is trivially easy to create domain-specific libraries of many small fun
Mea Culpa (Score:2)
"if so, why are you programmer" should of course read "If so, why are you a programmer?" Why am I still a programmer? )))
Re:Java (Score:4, Interesting)
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they made a huge mistake in picking it for their mobile platform).
I should make such a mistake. Android is blowing the doors off the mobile platform world at a time that no one thought anything could catch Apple. If you saying Google should have used a different base language for Android, you're ignoring the fact that Google bought Android, they didn't develop it. They chose it for it's potential and for the mass of java programmers that would be available to develop for it. Yea, really big mistake.
lulz (Score:2)
I love this guy. I'm about as pro-MS as they come, but even he's making me squirmish a bit. It's like listening to twitters' evil clone (if anyone remembers him).
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Man, I miss twitter. That guy was awesome.
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I think that Java and C# plays in the same division except that Java is a cleaner language than C# which suffers from infections from VB.
But it would be a lot more interesting to see what Gosling comes up with this time.
Really? I see more influence from Python than VB.
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Actually, anonymous blocks and first-class functions are very powerful and far predate Javascript (by decades). You might want to look into a language called "Lisp" sometime.
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You know, if you're interested in the origins and influence of C# ... you might want to check out it's (main) inventor : Anders Hejlsberg.
Interview on the origin of C# [artima.com] (the short version : Turbo Pascal => Borland Pascal => Delphi (Object pascal). If you've used these different languages, this is beyond obvious : C# is a more concise version of Delphi's Object Pascal)
Frankly, more people should try C#, it's a much more ... complete ... language than java when it comes to language features. It's got all
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So you object to dynamic typing? Again, maybe you should look into a language called Lisp, "buddy". These highly useful concepts have a long lineage, and ascribing what's happening in C# to Javascript is silly.
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"Its not dynamic typing. Its implicit typing. Its syntax sugar. The compiler looks at your "var" and says based on context decides what it should be."
Based on the static declared type of the right hand side. Which it had to check already.
I remember using a language with this a long time ago (Sather---beautilful and useful) and found it exceptionally useful, and essentially trivial for the compiler to implement.
It is most important when you want to declare something to to be "something that can hold a resul
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Anonymous types and "var" in C# do absolutely zilch to "make syntax more accessible to javascripters", because they do not correspond to anything in JS. In fact, C# "var" is profoundly confusing to someone with JS background, because they expect it to be a variable with a dynamic type, which it is not.
The reason why "var" exists is primarily to handle anonymous types, but secondarily also to avoid unnecessarily repeating yourself, as in:
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I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
How's that unjust war in Iraq that you're funding working out? Building civilization with it? Hmmm?
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I'm not an American citizen. That said, I do pay my taxes in US these days, so the question is still valid. The answer is that taxes pay for far more than that, and certainly a lot of what I directly enjoy. It is regrettable that so much is squandered, and it is duty of the citizens of a democratic state to minimize that - I wish I could help there, but alas there's little I can do with my present status.
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Actually, in JavaScript it would be:
var c = SomeFunction; // no paranthesis
function SomeFunction() { ...
}
And you can think of it like easy pointers in C. Appending the () would execute the method, which would be fine if you were returning the name of another function. Example:
function gimme() { ... } // would actually run someFunc
function someFunc() {
return someFunc;
}
gimme()();
Contrived as that is, there is a usefulness to it that you'd not see immediately if you were only formally trained in OO programming.
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Gotcha... sorry I didn't catch that. From the example it looked as though you were referencing the (anonymous, though I named mine when I could have returned it directly) first class functions. My mistake.
As far as implicit typing, it can be a good thing in "each" loops, but I agree: It can be misunderstood very easily by a second developer with less knowledge on the requirements or scope of the code.
WTF does this have to do with Javascript? (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is what I hate about C#, and I think it is JavaScript infection (they're doing the same to VB, which is pretty much now C# without braces): implicit and anonymous types. That shit is gross.
Ok, so I went and looked up implicit types in .NET [microsoft.com], and it turns out that they're nothing like Javascript. Javascript is a dynamically typed language; .NET languages are statically typed, but the compiler can infer the correct type of the variables.
I also went and looked up anonymous types [microsoft.com], and they clearly seem to help in writing database-oriented applications. Object-oriented code that's written to use an object-relation mapper very often suffers from the defect that it has to pull all of the columns of a table to construct the objects, even when the caller may only need a subset of those columns. By writing the clients so that their type specifies only the table attributes that they actually need, that allows for performance optimizations.
The .NET implementation doesn't look like it goes all the way in this regard, but hey, they're trying—something that can't be said for any other mainstream language with their crappy "SQL is just strings and prepared statements" nonmodel.
So again, WTF does any of this have to do with Javascript?
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The irony is that C# actually has opt-in dynamic "duck" typing (as of 4.0), only with a different keyword, and some helper library types:
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Named parameters and type inference were widely considered good ideas long before C# adopted them and are part of most modern programming languages.
The fact that you dislike them suggests that Java's limitations have really warped your mind.
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public class FooBar
{
private Object foo;
public void getFoo() { return foo; }
public void setFoo(Object _foo) { foo = _foo; }
private Object bar;
public void getBar() { return bar; }
public void setBar(Object _bar) { bar = _bar; }
FooBar() { }
}
for (int i = 0; i fooBars[i] = new FooBar();
fooBars[i].setFoo(results[i].getFoo());
fooBars[i].setBar)results[i].getBar());
}
when in C# I can do this:
var foo
Re:Java (Score:5, Funny)
I do. And frankly, I prefer eclipse to Visual Studio.
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Well let us know when it finally finishes loading workspaces so you can give us a detailed review.
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I would have expected Bill Gates to have a much, much lower Slashdot number.
Please, you and I had Slashdot accounts when Bill Gates was still saying that the Internet was a fad.
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Of course he'll ignore it. It's a common troll lately posting only positive things on Microsoft articles and negative things on anything Google. He's resorted to creating new accounts and posting first post on these articles and dumping the account afterward:
Here are some of the common accounts... I know there are more than just this though:
http://slashdot.org/~devxo [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/~deviok [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/~devozx [slashdot.org]
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Well. They do make piles of money with them. Surely putting some of our best and brightest minds to work selling web advertising can't be a mistake, after all, this is what the free market decided to do with all that talent.
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Well, from what I understand, Guido van Rossum is still very active in developing Python as part of his job at Google.
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And Rob Pike is developing Go, which seems very interesting as a systems language.
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BTW, it was Microsoft who specifically stated that a way to attack competition was to hire the brightest in the industry and pen them up in their own R&D area so they would not be out on the market to create something which was not Windows based. IIRC, it was in the Halloween Document.
LoB