171–180 of 239 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The story I heard was that it was the Java trademark that was a bigger problem for Microsft naming it JavaScript. But that's somewhat irrelevant as you're right about the more important point about how JScript was reverse engineered from JavaScript.
> Even MS is not evil all the time
There was a lot of differences Microsoft introduced in JScript and as you said, Netscape submitted Javascript to ECMA for standardisation only a year later yet MS still pushed ahead with IE-specific language features to lock people into IE.
This was a common stunt Microsoft pulled back in those days. Microsoft even had a term for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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.
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++.
> The new Java applications are NOT credible threats to traditional PC software any time soon Well, Nathan was right there. But even with Java as (depending on where you look) 2nd, 3rd or 4th popular programming language, how many of those applications are being run on Windows hardware? Developed maybe, but deployed? Ultimately Microsoft didn't get stung too badly by this, since they embraced Linux on the server but…
Well, if you look at how much .NET is used on Windows, they sort of prevented a java overtake by their own java-clone.
> "In the limit, they can make the web totally OS agnostic [...]" A good thing, surely.
Why was the "extinguish" step in "embrace and extend" left out?