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James Gosling leaves Oracle

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11–20 of 64 posts

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#11
post #9

No surprise here. It's too bad the IBM/Sun talks broke down, I think it would have been a much better marriage.

That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good? Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

Glad HN is not slashdot. Please elaborate why selling more SPARC servers would not have been a good thing for the many SUN employees affected by the merger.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#13
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they log into all machines running java and break them, why does it particularly matter? What's the worry here?

I am just wondering how involved Gosling is in JDK (in terms of roadmap, new features and such) now a days ... or is it primarily driven by the community?

I don't remember having seen his name for a long time in any technical discussion or decision involving Java, besides Closures, where he co-authored the BGGA proposal. Although it appears that Gafter and Bracha put more work in that one. Even then he did not apparently have enough say on the matter to make his blessed proposal official. His main role seems to be an evangelist for the platform and perhaps researcher for some more involved areas, like real-time systems and numerical processing, AFAICT from his blog posts.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#14
post #9

No surprise here. It's too bad the IBM/Sun talks broke down, I think it would have been a much better marriage.

That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good? Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

I'm guessing you're very young. NT used to be available on x86, MIPS, AXP and PowerPC. It was developed not on x86 but on i960, a RISC processor from Intel. There were plans for a SPARC version too but endianness issues in the HAL meant it was never performant.

The only reason Windows only runs on x86/x64 now is that customers weren't interested in it on other platforms. Microsoft really tried to make it cross platform.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#15
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just wondering how involved Gosling is in JDK (in terms of roadmap, new features and such) now a days ... or is it primarily driven by the community?

I don't think he has a close BDFL-style involvement with the Java SDK or standard library. From what I can observe, Java is, and has been, committee-driven since about 2000. And Gosling is too expensive to write code. His time is much better used in conferences, motivating developers.

I find it funny how you can be too expensive to code. I wonder when was the last time billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin coded for a large project just for the love of coding.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good? Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

Glad HN is not slashdot. Please elaborate why selling more SPARC servers would not have been a good thing for the many SUN employees affected by the merger.

The OP hypothesized merger between IBM and Sun would have been better than Oracle/Sun. If IBM had bought Sun, they would probably have killed the SPARC because IBM has their own RISC CPU, the Power series.

Brian Aker says "I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware." http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/a-mysql-update-from-brian-a... which means the SPARC survives.

[edit: proper quote]

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#17
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good? Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

I'm guessing you're very young. NT used to be available on x86, MIPS, AXP and PowerPC. It was developed not on x86 but on i960, a RISC processor from Intel. There were plans for a SPARC version too but endianness issues in the HAL meant it was never performant. The only reason Windows only runs on x86/x64 now is that customers weren't interested in it on other platforms. Microsoft really tried to make it cross platfo…

There are alternate histories regarding that: like how non x86 versions of NT were subpar and had a dearth of available software, and likely only existed to freeze the market for open-systems unix vendors, all of which had those CPU architectures as a strategic advantage.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good? Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

Glad HN is not slashdot. Please elaborate why selling more SPARC servers would not have been a good thing for the many SUN employees affected by the merger.

Apart from seeing the beautiful elegant hardware running a second-rate port of a second-rate OS and the patents Sun owns ending up on being auctioned to patent trolls so they could have a field day destroying every competition for Windows without implying Microsoft, nothing.

Apart from that, it would be a good thing.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#19
post #17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you're very young. NT used to be available on x86, MIPS, AXP and PowerPC. It was developed not on x86 but on i960, a RISC processor from Intel. There were plans for a SPARC version too but endianness issues in the HAL meant it was never performant. The only reason Windows only runs on x86/x64 now is that customers weren't interested in it on other platforms. Microsoft really tried to make it cross platfo…

There are alternate histories regarding that: like how non x86 versions of NT were subpar and had a dearth of available software, and likely only existed to freeze the market for open-systems unix vendors, all of which had those CPU architectures as a strategic advantage.

I played with NT on Alpha. It was a blazing-fast workstation that had almost no software except Softimage.

Lack of Office killed the desktop Windows on RISC.

On PPC, I remember SQL Server had some weird network bugs too.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#20
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good? Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

I'm guessing you're very young. NT used to be available on x86, MIPS, AXP and PowerPC. It was developed not on x86 but on i960, a RISC processor from Intel. There were plans for a SPARC version too but endianness issues in the HAL meant it was never performant. The only reason Windows only runs on x86/x64 now is that customers weren't interested in it on other platforms. Microsoft really tried to make it cross platfo…

> Microsoft really tried to make it cross platform.

They just forgot to port Office. IIRC, the then-current release of Visual Studio would run on x86 but compile to supported RISC platforms. That turned it into a server-only platform. No Office and no development tools before the dawn of the web application means certain desktop doom.

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