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James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

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Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#51

Post by chime »

CamperBob wrote: post #37
jrockway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. But Oracle does nothing but make software -- programmers are the absolute most important people on their projects. Oh yeah, I forgot. Oracle is a marketing company. If you want a nice database, use Postgres. If you want a database that sponsors a sailboat, buy Oracle.

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.

GE actually writes a lot of software, especially industrial applications. Their software division is bigger than most software-only companies: http://www.ge.com/products_services/software_services.html

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#52

Post by jrockway »

CamperBob wrote: post #37
jrockway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. But Oracle does nothing but make software -- programmers are the absolute most important people on their projects. Oh yeah, I forgot. Oracle is a marketing company. If you want a nice database, use Postgres. If you want a database that sponsors a sailboat, buy Oracle.

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.

Oh, I agree 100%. The software industry barely understands software (see also: offshoring), so I simply don't expect a non-software company to even be in the ballpark.

Big companies assume software projects will be failures, and treat their employees accordingly. Then they get what they expect.

(Hire a bunch of good programmers with good management, and you can get amazingly reliable software from a team of two. Hire a bunch of bad programmers, though, and a team of 100 produces something worse than most kids' intro-to-java app. But nobody but the best programmers understand this, and it looks better to the business to pay 10 people each $60,000 a year instead of paying 2 people $200,000 a year. When a big company "gets this", their software becomes a lot better.)

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#53

Post by va_coder »

I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important?

As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#54

Post by sshah »

JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace.

Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#55

Post by scorpion032 »

ajaxian wrote: post #15
paulbaumgart wrote: post #7

A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along. Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1]. Why? [1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers. The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going t…

Working for Oracle as a programmer _most often means_ working for innumerable number of ERP and middleware solutions they offer, not the database itself.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#56

Post by scorpion032 »

_delirium wrote: post #10
paulbaumgart wrote: post #7

A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along. Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1]. Why? [1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?

Yes. If it is a situation to side the customer or the developer, SAP would side the developer, Oracle most definitely the customer.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#57

Post by sprout »

jbarham wrote: post #49
Tamerlin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" they own a great processor (Sparc)" I'm not so sure about that. For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better). Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's. Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days.…

For those who don't get the chickens vs. bulls reference: "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray There are a lot of other great Cray quotes.

Of course, look at any modern Cray ads and Cray is using the same 1024 chickens everyone else in the livestock industry is using.

Sparc isn't failing because it's inferior to x86. Sparc is failing because Solaris is failing, and no other OS is built from the ground up for Sparc. You can run Linux and other Unix-likes on it, but given the choice between x86 and Sparc, you choose x86 because that's what's least likely to cause incompatibility issues.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#58

Post by protomyth »

sprout wrote: post #57
jbarham wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't get the chickens vs. bulls reference: "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray There are a lot of other great Cray quotes.

Of course, look at any modern Cray ads and Cray is using the same 1024 chickens everyone else in the livestock industry is using. Sparc isn't failing because it's inferior to x86. Sparc is failing because Solaris is failing, and no other OS is built from the ground up for Sparc. You can run Linux and other Unix-likes on it, but given the choice between x86 and Sparc, you choose x86 because that's what's least likely…

Well, to be fair, Seymour Cray is sadly not around anymore to build some better oxen and Cray has changed hands quite a few times.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#59

Post by zacharycohn »

Tamerlin wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle has already fired close to 7,000 people of the original 27,000 that were part of the merger, in June they announced a further 1,000 people to be thrown out but at the same time said they would hire 2,000 new ones mostly for the sales division. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604 I don't see how IBM could have done much worse, and I think that Java would have fared a lot better under IBM, which…

IBM's done worse before. In the late 90's my father was part of a first round of IBM layoffs -- in which they cut 6000 jobs... in Dutchess County, New York. That was the first round of layoffs. Another few thousand got cut a year so later. And I don't know how many they cut outside of Dutchess County...

Were they closing down the facility in Dutchess County? How big was it?

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#60

Post by b-man »

ajaxian wrote: post #48
varjag wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not arguing with the rest of your post, but what would you write a large-scale DBMS with, these days? Surely not jpython?

Fair point. I didn't intend to diss C, and if one were to write Oracle from scratch today, C is (sadly?) still probably the best option given its performance and portability constraints. What I had in mind was that for anyone who is technically capable of maintaining the core Oracle DB code base, there are more interesting and rewarding things they could be doing instead.

I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety. Then I would check the performance bottlenecks and rewrite them in C if needed.

Then I would use a more programmer friendly language on top of that. Something like Scheme, Ruby, Python and the like.

Stratified design, basically.

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