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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)

#111
post #107
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that he is worrying here not about improving their own things to compete, but about barrier for entry being low which means fast progress. Gatekeeping is bad, business owners or not. Strategy to nullify competition instead of competing is disgusting and damaging to progress and market itself.

Is there a strategy to nullify competition in the mails? They simply stated that they are worried about the coming competition, which is completely normal for any business.

Given how anti-competitive MS was in practice, I totally read it all in a negative way. Especially when they mention "embrace and extend" in the same discussion.

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

#112
post #109
post #13

And nowadays they are an OpenJDK contributor, were part of the companies doing the ARM port, and develop Java support for VSCode in collaboration with Red-Hat. Meanwhile the chocolate factory has created their own version of ".NET" for phones.

the what factory?

A common meme to refer to Google, based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

I was also puzzled by this one. Does he mean Java applets maybe?

That’s exactly it, and led to activex in response.

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

#114
post #12

I still have a JavaOne tshirt in the back of my closet that says, In a World Without Fences, Who Needs Gates?

There was a tombstone of Gates during hackers in progress (hip97) iirc. Shows you how much he and windows was loved. Today’s microsoft is forced to play nice.

If Microsoft hadn't existed, everyone would be bitching just the same about whichever tech titan would have formed in their absence and erecting tombstones of their founders. It's not as if any of the other wannabes jockeying for power in that era would have had any hesitation in using their dominance anti-competitively either if they had gotten it. Even a certain scrappy don't-be-evil business that hackers were cheerleading at the time didn't manage to resist the lure of leveraging their market dominance.

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

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’ll take jquery over react any day of the week and ask for less money because it’s more productive

It depends what you're building.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Vue is good. jQuery sucks.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my gut feeling about the new AI technologies we've seen recently. We'll see what happens

Amara's Law: "We overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term. We under estimate its impact in the long term."

There's a tendency to overestimate things, but not so sure about the underestimate part. Unless I missed something I don't think there are many people running NoSQL databases on Itanium processors with GNU Hurd powering their XSLT/Xforms website.

(NoSQL is still useful, but it didn't "replace SQL" as promised, and the others have completely failed in spite of promising much).

It's always hard to predict the future; often the first iteration of something new isn't very good or even downright bad, and it's not easy to predict if it will ever be any good. I remember trying Rust somewhere in the early 2010s "before it was cool" and I hit some bug in the installation (would eat up all my memory). Then I tried the new version that fixed it and I ran in to problems actually compiling programs due to another bug. This doesn't reflect the status of Rust today at all, but back then it was essentially impossible for me to tell if it would always remain the buggy mess it was then, or if it would be able to put itself together and become stable. There's been plenty of buggy things that never became stable (Itanium, Hurd).

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

#118
Folks underestimate the important role Java had in saving open systems and Unix, and then enabling Linux on the server side. Around 1996, Windows already was the platform of choice for most new projects on the server side, after totally dominating the client side (desktop).

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’ll take jquery over react any day of the week and ask for less money because it’s more productive

It really depends what you're doing, and with how many people you're doing it.

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

#120
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand what they are.

Basically data objects loaded via orm, with code to repersist to database when updated. ... except there was a long road of transactions, distributed architecture issues, etc still to hammer out, and these were the days of a gig of ram maybe and no ssds, and 100 base t if you were lucky. And jit was a wip. So it was a app server with its own dedicated mumbo jumbo for everything to dazzle CEOs.

And in my day, if I recall correctly, it took a good dozen or so XML files to describe and configure a single EJB.

Thanks, JOnAS. I still have hate in my heart.

And now ORM in Java (with JPA) is a simple @Entity. Ahh, the warm, cozy feeling of abstraction.

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