Java Creator James Gosling Joins Amazon Web Services (geekwire.com) 90
The legendary computer scientist and founder of Java, James Gosling, is joining forces with Amazon Web Services. Gosling made the announcement today on Facebook saying that he's "starting a new Adventure" with the cloud computing juggernaut as a Distinguished Engineer. GeekWire reports: Gosling wrote Java, one of the most widely used programming languages in the history of computing, while at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. After leaving Sun following its acquisition by Oracle, Gosling did a short stint at Google before settling in for almost six years at Liquid Robotics, which is working on an autonomous boat called the Wave Glider. He likely ruffled a few feathers in Seattle last year after speaking out about fears of cloud vendor lock-in. "You get cloud providers like Amazon saying: 'Take your applications and move them to the cloud.' But as soon as you start using them you're stuck in that particular cloud," he said at IP Expo according to The Inquirer, echoing the sentiment of some skeptical IT organizations burned by enterprise vendors in the past.
I guess the pay is good... (Score:3, Insightful)
for him to go back on his ideals like this. I would never work for Amazon after so many of my friends were worked nearly to death and then bitten by dogs in their office. Stressed-out and lack of sleep is something dogs notice, and that greatly increases the chances of getting bitten.
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:1)
This. Amazon is everything we've all fought against.
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Uhhh, no. Warehouse workers get paid for their time so Amazon isn't requiring them to work much more than forty.
They do require tech workers often to work Mon-Thu 16 hours a day and then Friday through Sunday 12 hours a day which is Seattle hundreds. Since we're exempt from overtime and mostly get paid salary, Amazon mostly pays us next to nothing extra for that time. Working Seattle hundreds since 1998 has sucked. I have no life and my health is crap.
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really too bad that Amazon are the only high-tech shop in the world - that workers don't have the option of taking their services to another company with better policies
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It's really too bad that Amazon are the only high-tech shop in the world - that workers don't have the option of taking their services to another company with better policies
My thoughts exactly. With that said, and I don't mean to dismiss what is being claimed here. I know people who work at Amazon, and none of them have reported such ludicrous work hours. I know they work hard, but to heard this claim, it defies by belief threshold.
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:1)
That's because programmers were too short-sighted to join a union when times were good. Now that our once-proud profession has been thoroughly proletarianized, people are starting to change their minds.
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:1)
Who wants to equalize pay? That's not what a union is about.
The benefits we win with a union are simple:
* A raise for EVERYONE. Nominal salaries have been stagnant for a decade, while real cost of living doubled and programmer productivity continued to rise. All that money stolen from the workers just made some inherited rich silverspoon VCs a little bit richer.
* Protection from 19th Century style abusive labor practices like the "Seattle hundred". Amazon wins the Scrooge Award here, but 60+ hour work week
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1) I get a new raise when I need one, I just find a new job.
2) Move out of the big cities and flee the large companies. You can easily make 90-130k in the midwest at a smaller shop with a much lower cost of living and a straight 40 hour work day.
3) Overseas protection doesn't work if they can literally move all of you overseas, and they can.
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Move?
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Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:1)
Wow - you make 100x as much as your peers in the same company? That's awesome!
Or wait - did you mean you feel like you're 100x better, and your employer recognizes that by paying you 10% more? Whew-wee, that's really super special. How many "Seattle hundreds" did you have to work to achieve that exalted status? Are you still required to waste a little of your life every morning in the demeaning, anti-productive bureaucratic "scrum" ritual?
Now in fully-unionized Hollywood, some high performing actors real
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:1)
Wal-Mart on web wheels...
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:5, Funny)
Amazon is what we get in an environment with weaker unions.
Well, Java doesn't have unions at all. Gosling explicitly excluded them from the language.
Re: I guess the pay is good... (Score:5, Funny)
Amazon pays more productive workers more so I guess that is why lazy union workers hate them. For me, I've worked for Amazon since early 1996 and haven't had a single weekday off. I think I've taken six weekends off in that over twenty-one years. I would hate to see some lazy union member make as much as me.
Re: Leftists hate America (Score:1)
Short memory, have you? You had a leftist president during WW II. Good thing because you'd all be goose stepping right now if it wasn't for him.
5 minute provisioning times YEEHA (Score:2, Funny)
with.lots.of.different.methods.to.chose.and.remember.from.tobe() implements java
I guess there is always Azure ... haha sorry had to type that last sentence
Java - the most awful programming language ever (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't correct him. He's obviously someone still stuck on antiquated programming languages from the 1970s or 1980s that don't offer threads. He goes with what he knows.
Re:Java - the most awful programming language ever (Score:4, Insightful)
it's not a bad language and the vm's arent that bad. ..a lot of the stuff people make with it is bad though. a lot of the frameworks and stuff people use it is pretty bad though. ..like, needing 10 lines of code to interface something that goes into kilobytes of something to CALL A METHOD YOU COULD JUST HAVE CALLED DIRECTLY YOURSELF.
doesn't really help that experts recommend using libraries and frameworks when they are completely unnecessary(usually written by them - googles android division does this one quite a lot.. so much they can't even explain why themselves or why you should use their way instead).
also, bollocks of bollocks of more stuff to make things "easier", like plugging in an event system to call a method when you could just call the method directly. here's a hint: you shouldn't use reflection as basis of how your programs logic is going to run - it's just STUPID.
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Do you not realize that AWS is already largely powered by Java microservices?
Indeed. That tells you everything you need to know the technical quality of posters in /.
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Just because AWS is powered by Java does not negate the fact AWS is utter fucking horse shit, and no one in their right mind would ever use it.
You are emotional, not factual.
Only trendy fagot balls riders who *really* don't understand network and computing architectures use that shit.
Emergency! Emergency! "No true Scotsman" detected in the vicinity.
Updates? (Score:1, Insightful)
Now instead of a web page GUI or API, we'll need a java client loaded locally that dependent upon a certain version of JRE just like CIsco crappy GUI interfaces. Will we get prompted to install macafee everytime we connect?
Tough crowd tonight... (Score:5, Funny)
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You literally just said the opposite of what you think you said.
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You literally just said the opposite of what you think you said.
WOOOSH!
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You would sacrifice him at the Alter of Youth? His best creative years may still be ahead of him.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/creativity-can-last-well-into-old-age-as-long-as-creators-stay-open-to-new-ideas/2013/11/21/31487172-52ca-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
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-Tao of Programming [mit.edu]
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Thank you for the Tao reference. I enjoyed it greatly!
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I stand corrected.
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Shit, don't strain yourself; when's the last time you stood?
When was the last time you asked an intelligent question?
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Not when I was talking to you, that's for sure.
Fat people make you stupid? That would explain a lot.
Re:should have hired someone else (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe hire someone younger who has new ideas and is likely to invent the next big thing. Not some old fart that is going to sit around with his grand title while people worship his decades old accomplishments.
I get that sort of attitude at times from the younger folks I work with. Like the time they wanted to run a Ethernet connection a few thousand feet on a fence with repeaters. "Hum, guys, we get a lot of electrical noise from the substation next door and lighting around here. Might want to explore fibre." No no! they said. Every thing will be fine they said. After replacing a few Cisco routers over a year's time, they -ahem- installed fibre.
Or the time I said "Hey, let's not use discrete LEDs for that, let's use a matrix" Company went bankrupt when our competitors used -ahem- matrices.
Or maybe read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or maybe realize that it isn't chronological time the ossifies brains, but complacency, lack of ambition, lack of team work, and a lack of being open to ideas of others and doesn't have anything at all to do with how old someome is.
On the flip side of that, someone told me I was doing something wrong. Before I opened my mouth to say "Sonny boy, I've been doing this thirty years!" I thought about their criticism and realized that I had, in fact, been doing it wrong for 30 years. I was pretty damned embarrassed.
We all, in fact, live exactly the same length of time - right now. We don't live yesterday, we don't live tomorrow. We live right now.
Just sayin'.
Legendary (Score:5, Interesting)
Legendary for Gosling Emacs, preceding GNU Emacs which copied liberally from it. The fact that he sold it to UniPress which later requested Stallman remove Gosling's code from GNU Emacs was the impetus for Stallman to create the GPL.
Re:Legendary (Score:5, Informative)
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You can actually look at the Gosling source code here [donhopkins.com]. It was a library for drawing updates to the screen (with a dynamic programming library), and actually the source code got shared and was being used in a lot of places, not just emacs. That was the main thing Stallman had to rewrite, and when he did, he ended up making it more efficient.
This description understates the EMACS-related achievements of both.
RMS was the primary creator of the original EMACS, written in TECO macros and PDP-10 assembly (though note that EMACS itself was an extension of earlier work by others, and Guy Steele also contributed a huge amount to EMACS). Gosling reimplemented EMACS in C, including his own extension language called Mocklisp, which looked like LISP, but lacked key features of LISP, like lists.
The most clever part of Gosling EMACS (Gosmacs) was the dr
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adventure time! (Score:2)
everything has to be a fucking "adventure" now.
Will he do any actual technical work? (Score:2)
Or will it mostly be serving as window dressing to sales presentation and serving as "inspiration" to actual developers in the kind of relentless cheeleading meetings I assume corporate giants like Amazon indulge in?