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James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

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Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#81

Post by tamersalama »

docgnome wrote: post #68
jrockway wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones. This is pointed out constantly on HN and in other programming communities. I'm curious though if anyone has any hard data to support this, beyond anecdotal evidence. (I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I agree completely. I'm just interested in seeing any studies done on the subject. I imagine this applies to many other fields…

Data are hard to come by in the industry (compared to, say, manufacturing where science branches were spawned based on analysis, observations).

From where I stand, the cost of poor quality software goes beyond the production. It's more in maintenance, licensing, lost opportunities, and poor adaptability to changing business needs.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#83

Post by gaius »

docgnome wrote: post #68
jrockway wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones. This is pointed out constantly on HN and in other programming communities. I'm curious though if anyone has any hard data to support this, beyond anecdotal evidence. (I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I agree completely. I'm just interested in seeing any studies done on the subject. I imagine this applies to many other fields…

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones

The question is, tho', "at what"? Oracle's product offering is VAST. And most of it is technically quite simple; it just does an awful lot. You can't use clever Lisp macros to do stuff like this: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard You just have to chuck people at it.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#84

Post by mahmud »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
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?

Perhaps with 2010 style C ;-) But maybe, just maybe, I would first connect Oracle's prodigious moneyduct into a team writing a kick-ass Lisp compiler and then writing the best RDBMS using Lisp. One can dream...

Not an RDBMS, but AllegoGraph is in Lisp and is the most high-end NoSQL out there. Literally, the Oracle of object stores.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#85

Post by gaius »

strlen wrote: post #67
jbjohns wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when as a technical person you have no track anyway?

Most companies do have technical career path. Being a permanent employee not only gives you the benefits (others have listed them), but also lets you work on much more interesting projects (contractors typically work on isolated projects rather than on core systems and algorithms; I know, of course, of exceptions to that but they're rare). It also frees you up of the overhead of finding the next contract. I know many…

Most companies do have technical career path

Genuine question - who? The technical career path at almost every organization ends after about 10 years, then it's management or plateau.

Remember - companies are run by people who fundamentally don't, or can't, understand why everyone doesn't aspire to management...

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#86

Post by earl »

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.

I don't think it's necessarily a career path, or lack thereof, but the companies' perspective on software: I left biotech because the companies I worked for, and it seemed to be an industry problem, viewed software not as their differentiator or edge or product, but rather purely as a cost center to be minimized. From that distinction, everything flows.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#87

Post by davidw »

rbanffy wrote: post #65
b-man wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety I am not sure about Haskell, but, from my limited experience, Erlang runs at levels very close to C (my C, at least)

In terms of speed? Erlang's not even in the ballpark that C is in. I'm pretty sure Haskell significantly outperforms Erlang as well.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#88

Post by wh-uws »

va_coder wrote: post #53

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.

I can answer that one... their pointy haired bosses read the ads in the airports and business magazines that say "98% of Fortune 500 companies" use Oracle

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#89

Post by zvrba »

Personally, I think that Gosling got what he deserved considering the pain he inflicted on myriads of developers with Java. (Yes, there are some nice technologies in the Java platform. But Java language is not one of them.)

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#90

Post by gaius »

jonknee wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million That's just Larry's favorite toy, I'd imagine the IRS to be interested in that as a deferred payment rather than Oracles shareholders, whatever floats Larry's boat (pun intended) is fine with them, as long as he delivers.

IIRC Oracle doesn't pay anything, they're name is just on the boat because Ellison wants it to be. He's the one paying for it. But I'm sure the boat is actually owned by a corporation that gets its own write offs.

It's owned by BMW Oracle Racing, which is a separate company whose mission is essentially the same as an F1 team's - get their sponsor's names in everyone's minds by winning stuff on TV.
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