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Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

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Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#81

Post by irrational »

black_puppydog wrote: post #69

I loved this part. It's not new but nicely put: > As you and know very well, this sort of widespread interest can become a self fullfilling phenomenon, because programmer attention creates programs. Some of these will be successful and that only fuels more participation in the phenomenon. I hope this is what's happening with Rust. :) I also thought this paragraph just afterwards had an interesting point: > In the lim…

> it was Netscape that broke MS' monopoly with Internet Explorer

What do you mean by this? We used Netscape Navigator for quite a while before trying a version of IE.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#82

Post by cm2187 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #76
cm2187 wrote: post #65

Has anyone ever used the cross platform capability of java? Java is cross platform in the way c is cross platform, you can compile to many target platforms. But aren't pretty much all java applications intended to run on one specific platform only? Developers like the idea of cross platform but they pretty much never use it. I think javascript is the only language that is truly used in a cross platform way.

[flagged]

But there are hardly any java desktop apps aren't they?

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#83

Post by irrational »

pototo666 wrote: post #54
resonious wrote: post #30

> First, the excitement is overblown - at least from a business perspective. At the moment Java is expanding into a vacuum. It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people. It gives programmers something new to learn, book people something new to sell books on, software tool companies a way to issue new development tools etc. This is a pretty interesting take, and it feels relevan…

> no one will be going out of business just because their frontend isn't React Yes. But one is more likely to go out of business if their frontend is still using JQuery. It's harder to maintain and iterate, harder to recruite good engineers. I would ask for more money if the company hiring me uses JQuery and doesn't use TypeScript/React. And if the company somehow hires me, I would be less productive because I can't…

What if they use typescript/Vue? I work for a fortune 100 company that uses Vue. We have found that people familiar with react can pick up Vue very quickly. That hardly seems like a reason to ask for more money.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#84

Post by numpad0 »

cm2187 wrote: post #65

Has anyone ever used the cross platform capability of java? Java is cross platform in the way c is cross platform, you can compile to many target platforms. But aren't pretty much all java applications intended to run on one specific platform only? Developers like the idea of cross platform but they pretty much never use it. I think javascript is the only language that is truly used in a cross platform way.

Minecraft. Macs were always missing games, and Minecraft was "the only game" that ran on MacBook without Bootcamp in late 2010s. Other than that, I'm sure have seen it happen but not sure...

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#85

Post by irrational »

antod wrote: post #61
faefox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, VR and metaverse-style concepts were big in the 90s even if the technology obviously wasn't quite there yet. Active Worlds predated Second Life by several years and surprisingly enough is still online to this day.

I remember VRML going nowhere fast.

I read a book on vrml back in the 90s and was convinced it was going to be huge.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#86

Post by wruza »

pototo666 wrote: post #54
resonious wrote: post #30

> First, the excitement is overblown - at least from a business perspective. At the moment Java is expanding into a vacuum. It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people. It gives programmers something new to learn, book people something new to sell books on, software tool companies a way to issue new development tools etc. This is a pretty interesting take, and it feels relevan…

> no one will be going out of business just because their frontend isn't React Yes. But one is more likely to go out of business if their frontend is still using JQuery. It's harder to maintain and iterate, harder to recruite good engineers. I would ask for more money if the company hiring me uses JQuery and doesn't use TypeScript/React. And if the company somehow hires me, I would be less productive because I can't…

My experience with True React Frontenders is opposite, except for more money nuance. I don’t even feel that “no one will be going out of business” vibe, really (but that must depend on a type of a business).

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#87

Post by Beltalowda »

cm2187 wrote: post #72
ridruejo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was (and is) very common to develop on a Windows desktop / laptop and deploy to a Linux server

Exactly, that's the "c is cross platform" way. What java offers is that you compile once and you can run the same binaries on any platform (hence freely switching OS as Bill Gates feared). But who uses that in real life? Because compiling on windows and deploying on linux/unix/etc, that was posssible 20 years before java in c/c++.

> Because compiling on windows and deploying on linux/unix/etc, that was posssible 20 years before java in c/c++.

"20 years before Java"? That's 1975 we're talking about.

Was it possible to build a program on Windows 95/NT and then deploy that to a Unix system? Probably. But given that today this can still be quite a pain to cross-compile C code I bet it wasn't easy. Besides, "it compiles" doesn't mean "it works" or "it works on this other platform" (quite likely with a different CPU architecture), especially not in C. And few people were writing any tests in the 90s.

Java abstracted a lot of details like endianness, platform-specific APIs, etc. away.

> who uses that in real life?

There's quite a few cross-platform Java desktop apps; the IntelliJ IDEs are a good example (although they've since developed Kotlin, it's still the same Java VM). DBeaver is another example, openoffice.org used quite a bit of Java back in the day (although I think that's mostly phased out now) – I'm sure there are more.

And of course in the 90s you had Java Web Applets.

Java is a bit less popular for this than it was, but I've run plenty of Java programs on my FreeBSD machine back in the day, and I'm pretty sure "FreeBSD" wasn't really something the developers really thought of when they wrote it (I can't remember which off-hand, it was a long time ago but I have "fond" memories of dealing with the manual installation bruhhaha because of the license at the time).

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#88

Post by aeturnum »

cm2187 wrote: post #65

Has anyone ever used the cross platform capability of java? Java is cross platform in the way c is cross platform, you can compile to many target platforms. But aren't pretty much all java applications intended to run on one specific platform only? Developers like the idea of cross platform but they pretty much never use it. I think javascript is the only language that is truly used in a cross platform way.

Yes! Especially in the 90s. The multi-platform story for most things was SO BAD for SO LONG. Now we have better toolchains and we can deploy to most systems easily, but that's a historical aberration. We spent a lot longer struggling in the dark.

That's not to say that Java provided a "good" cross-platform experience by our current standards - but the fact that it provided it at all was huge!

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#89

Post by cm2187 »

Beltalowda wrote: post #87
cm2187 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, that's the "c is cross platform" way. What java offers is that you compile once and you can run the same binaries on any platform (hence freely switching OS as Bill Gates feared). But who uses that in real life? Because compiling on windows and deploying on linux/unix/etc, that was posssible 20 years before java in c/c++.

> Because compiling on windows and deploying on linux/unix/etc, that was posssible 20 years before java in c/c++. "20 years before Java"? That's 1975 we're talking about. Was it possible to build a program on Windows 95/NT and then deploy that to a Unix system? Probably. But given that today this can still be quite a pain to cross-compile C code I bet it wasn't easy. Besides, "it compiles" doesn't mean "it works" or…

> Java abstracted a lot of details like endianness, platform-specific APIs, etc. away.

Well POSIX dates from the late 80s. That's not cross-CPU, but at least cross-OS, which is what Gates was really concerned about.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#90

Post by safety1st »

chrisco255 wrote: post #71
eddsh1994 wrote: post #18

> Virtual worlds could be such a thing Haha, Metaverse talk while Zuckerberg was in preschool

What's interesting to note is that Microsoft now owns Minecraft, which is one of the most successful "virtual worlds" I can think of.

They are also in the process of acquiring Activision and World of Warcraft...
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