Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996) • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by ketzu » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:22 AM UTC

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"

Besides the point that it is 1996 and probably talking about applets, wouldn't spring boot backends fall into the modern interpretation of "mak[ing] cool web pages"? Sure, java is used for more, but the number of job ads led me to believe it is quite a substantial part of java development.

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

#132

Post by mrblampo » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:24 AM UTC

This was super interesting, and it would seem Bill Gates absolutely predicted the effect that not Java, but ultimately interactive web apps in a broad sense would come to have by making it less important to have one operating system or another.

Interesting that the reply mostly implied that there wasn't much reason to worry, and that the future and dominance of web apps was still uncertain. But we are reading this email exchange now I think largely because of how well placed Bill Gates's worries were. I wonder how many technologies he and other executives lost sleep over that did not amount to anything in the long run.

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

#133

Post by peoplefromibiza » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:25 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #42

jbverschoor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

github just removed git: urls from their web ui so it no longer tells you how to make a clone you can push from using standard git it's been replaced with instructions for using their own gh cli tool (which, however, is also free software) for example on any github project page, https://github.com/username/projectname , click on the "code ↓" button in the top right; the "local" tab on the left has a "clone" tab with…

> embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well

???

you can clone Github projects and move them on every other git repository you want

if Github removed the support for git, Github would be dead in a week.

Not only because git is literally in their name, but because every programmer tool that deals with code (editors, IDEs, etc.) has embedded support for git, the protocol, not git the Github version of the protocol.

Remove interoperability and you killed the golden goose.

At MS are not that stupid.

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

#134

Post by hnlmorg » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:26 AM UTC

LAC-Tech wrote: post #130

hnlmorg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Internet Explorer dominated for years. Microsoft killed Netscape not the other way around. Did they? I can remember switching from IE to netscape about 2 years before it died, and then going into whatever the precursor to FF was called.

Yes. I’m 100% sure about that :)

Is there a chance you’re thinking about Opera? That didn’t kill Internet Explorer either but it was around before FireFox gained traction.

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

#135

Post by hnlmorg » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:27 AM UTC

Beltalowda wrote: post #124

hnlmorg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> which Java engine you wanted your browser to use and Microsoft Java (or whatever it was called) It was called JScript. It was released after JavaScript. I am a peaceful man; never been in a fight with anybody, and oppose the death penalty. The exception is that I think all the people responsible for this clusterfuck of names should be shot.

JScript / JavaScript is a different language entirely from Java but another good example of how Microsoft tried to control the market.

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

#136

Post by peoplefromibiza » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:29 AM UTC

Beltalowda wrote: post #124

hnlmorg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> which Java engine you wanted your browser to use and Microsoft Java (or whatever it was called) It was called JScript. It was released after JavaScript. I am a peaceful man; never been in a fight with anybody, and oppose the death penalty. The exception is that I think all the people responsible for this clusterfuck of names should be shot.

JScript was their version of JavaScript

You could also use VBScript in the browser if you wanted to, it's been an option up to IE 11

IE had pluggable scripting engines, which wasn't a bad idea per se and anyone could write one, it was a simple COM component

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

#137

Post by college_physics » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:29 AM UTC

jabza_ wrote: post #3

Writing this from an Android device

Surprised this point not realized or discussed more in this thread. Android is famously claimed by linux fans but for all practical purposes its a Java device which factually made this technology among the most impactful on the planet.

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

#138

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:32 AM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #98

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 c…

> Microsoft was taken to court for their own proprietary implementation of Java

That's correct, they tried hard to fracture Java by making different implementation with their own classes and packages, runtime behaved a bit different too. While whole sales pitch for Java was to write and compile once, and run reliably anywhere (which was the case for every C/C++ app especially UI).

Embrace part done, extinguish attempted. Everybody was very glad seeing them get burn, courts did their job and MS rolled back any Java participation. The rest is history (and present)

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

#139

Post by robinsonb5 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:33 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #51

Scaevolus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be logged into github for the SSH clone tab to appear-- if they don't know your pubkey you can't connect using the SSH protocol. Git can push over HTTPS, too.

aha, that wasn't previously the case, thanks for the correction whether i'm logged in in my browser has nothing to do with whether my ssh client has access to an authorized private key

This may have something to do with one of my other pet hates - projects with submodules using git:// urls. If you don't use SSH keys for github you can't do a "git submodule update --init" without first changing the submodule urls in .git/config to https:// style.

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

#140

Post by peoplefromibiza » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 8:33 AM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #135

Beltalowda wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which Java engine you wanted your browser to use and Microsoft Java (or whatever it was called) It was called JScript. It was released after JavaScript. I am a peaceful man; never been in a fight with anybody, and oppose the death penalty. The exception is that I think all the people responsible for this clusterfuck of names should be shot.

JScript / JavaScript is a different language entirely from Java but another good example of how Microsoft tried to control the market.

TBF, when JScript was born, JavaScript wasn't public nor free, it was Netscape's

Javascript came out in 1995, JScript in 1996, the ECMAScript standardization began in 1997 and the first release is from 1998

They reverse engineered the language and named it differently because they had no rights over JavaScript at the time

And good lord they did it, they could have adopted another language as the default one (they had VBScript too) and the story of the front end programming could have been very different.

Even MS is not evil all the time