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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)

#91

Post by allisdust »

moring wrote: post #40
allisdust wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your current OS is the market leader why wouldn't you lose sleep over it. They are running a business and have to worry about the competition. Progress on competing products might be good for consumers but not for the employees or shareholders of the company.

If you are afraid of progress then you aren't the market leader because you aren't leading. You just happen to be the biggest company currently on the market. Why not expand on the things where portable software is weak, like making a well-integrated system? But they missed it and let Apple fill that space. Why not accept the future you predicted and be the first to arrive there? But web development only considered M…

Fear is the first step in taking steps to compete. Its an acknowledgement of the threat from a better product. If any company doesn't have that they will fail. This can be seen during the ballmer era where he totally ignored the threat posed by iPhone and ended up conceding entire mobile os market share to Apple and Google.

Whenever questions like why are they afraid of progress, it's for common good etc come up (which I feel are based on morality) , it makes sense to imagine yourself in their shoes and see what you would do.

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

#92

Post by Beltalowda »

nostromo wrote: post #21
invalidname wrote: post #8

I don't like it when people focus on grammar too much but "I am worry..."?

It’s a Silicon Valley pro-tip: spelling and grammatical mistakes are signs that you’re super busy or too rich to care. There’s a few famous VCs that are apparently too busy to ever capitalize a letter... Too busy to shift!

Example from the same site: https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-ste...

Personally, I'd struggle to not capitalize things. It's just automatic.

I do believe there was a bit of a fashion to not capitalize things for a while too; I remember some people doing it on the interwebz.

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

#93

Post by heffer »

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++.

There are a few examples of where this is done. One that comes to my mind would be JOSM: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ You download one JAR file for any platform you intend to run the application on. There are installers for convenience but the JAR file works just as-is.

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

#94

Post by Beltalowda »

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…

> On the client side it was Netscape that broke MS' monopoly with Internet Explorer

What? Microsoft completely obliterated Netscape, which was dominant before IE. In the early 2000s IE had like ~95% market share. Later Mozilla Firefox turned that around, but only after they made the steaming pile of shit that was Netscape vaguely decent, which took a few years.

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

#96

Post by bitcharmer »

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…

> It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people

This is the most misinformed take on what Java is used for I have seen on HN. Today Java is used by FAANG and other tech shops. It's employed in the enterprise, science and finance. What it is almost never used for is creating "cool web pages"

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

#97

Post by pjmlp »

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++.

We use it all the time, the JARs compiled on Windows get deployed on the cloud without changes, instead of microservices one gets modules (binaries) that consumers cannot mess with unless they are into binary hacking, compiled just once.

Nowadays we do the same with .NET code as well, when using .NET Core.

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

#98

Post by hnlmorg »

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…

Internet Explorer dominated for years. Microsoft killed Netscape not the other way around.

Mozilla helped with the downfall of IE but it was really Google that put the final nail in the coffin.

As for backend, Microsoft had some systems running IIS and Apache can run on Windows Server too, but UNIX and Linux was always the dominant platform for web hosting. Java didn’t change anything there.

Javas impact on Windows can be felt more with .NET, which started life as a direct competitor to Java, after Microsoft was taken to court for their own proprietary implementation of Java (if I recall that part correctly). There was a time when you’d have to select which Java engine you wanted your browser to use and Microsoft Java (or whatever it was called) and Sun Java weren’t fully compatible with each other.

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

#99

Post by pjmlp »

cm2187 wrote: post #89
Beltalowda wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Anyone doing POSIX in the mid-90's has the scars to prove how "portable" POSIX is in reality, autoconf wasn't created out of coding pleasure.

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

#100

Post by pavlov »

bitcharmer wrote: post #96
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…

> It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people This is the most misinformed take on what Java is used for I have seen on HN. Today Java is used by FAANG and other tech shops. It's employed in the enterprise, science and finance. What it is almost never used for is creating "cool web pages"

It’s a quote from 1996.
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