Judge to Oracle: A High Schooler Could Write rangeCheck

mikejuk writes with an update on the Oracle vs Google Trial. From the article: "One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code. Will this affect the outcome? I think so! After trying to establish that the nine lines in rangeCheck that were copied saved Google time in getting Android to market the lawyer making the case is interrupted by the judge which indicates he at least does understand how straightforward it would be to program rangeCheck from scratch: 'rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it — ' And the lawyer reveals he doesn't: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Perhaps every judge should be a coding judge — it must make the law seem a lot simpler..." From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch. Groklaw, continuing its detailed coverage as always, has the motions filed today.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[Anaerin]

It's such a short and simple function that you could conceivably get two different people to write it and they'd end up with exactly the same code. The code reads:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);

if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

There's nothing you could really remove or change about it. Sure, you could put the checks in a different order, but it wouldn't fundamentally alter the code.

Misleading title -- Judge didn't say that!

[mattdm]

Title says implies that the judge made the statement about the code being trivial. The judge makes no such claim -- instead, he says that a previous Google witness made that claim. This is a world of difference!

Re:The juicy bits

[MightyMartian]

It's so beautiful, it makes me want to cry... We should have it carved in a great stone monolith for all to see.

If only this judge had been around when SCO was trying to claim ownership to the Linux scheduler.

Re:A high schooler?

[secret_squirrel_99]

To tell you the true, this gives us a clear hint about Oracle's future.

SCO did exactly the same thing in the past - but, honestly, I think SCO's lawyers did a better job.

In what way? Oracle is the 2nd biggest software house on the planet, the clear leader in several verticals and makes and/or sells literally hundreds of products. Which of these things in even a remote way, describes SCO?

Re:A high schooler?

[hey!]

J2ME is a pretty feature-limited version of Java

Well, having spent a number of years watching J2ME, I'd say the problem wasn't that J2ME was feature limited. I had things I could do even in MIDP that were quite useful, to say nothing of the Personal Basis Profile.

As an early app developer, we had two concerns with J2ME: how to get our app in our users' hands, not getting tied to a particular carrier (and thus losing access to corporate customers who used different carriers) or even handset. You got your J2ME SDK from the handset vendor and the handset vendors were the mobile carriers' slaves. The same phone would have different capabilities on different carriers because they deleted features the carriers didn't want (for price positioning or because the features conflicted with the carriers' laughable ambitions to become content companies).

When Apple came along with the iPhone, they did three important things. First, they didn't take any crap from the carrier (AT&T), they defined the product themselves. Second, they made it possible to run an app on any iOS device (originally just the iPhone, but later the iPod Touch too). Third, they had a simple mechanism for getting your app into the customer's hands. That made it possible to create a successful product for iOS in a way it had never been possible in J2ME.

I believe the fact that it Apple made it easy to sell apps for iOS is what is responsible for the success of attracting developers to the platform early on. It wasn't some kind of Apple UI secret sauce, although touch screens standard was a big advance. J2ME could have been an entrenched mobile standard years before the iPhone came out, if Sun had only taken steps to create a market (not necessarily an app store) for developers to target.

Then Android came along, and it was everything I'd ever hoped for: well thought out, robust, open source, feature-rich, vendor independent, even *app store* independent. But by then I was out of the business.