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James Gosling has contributed more to humanity than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived. I think he deserves better than this narrow, one-sided libel.
Really? By inventing Java?
Richard Stallman on James Gosling: “[…] a friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling’s own words in his own manual that he was going t…
Is the host going to a funeral after recording the podcast with no time to change?
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Really? By inventing Java?
I don't particularly like java. Most don't. But it's undeniably well designed. Some of its design choices have fallen out of favour in recent times—I still disagree with their elision of unsigned integers—but they're generally at least defensible .
Java took off because it offered developers a path out of serfdom to Microsoft, at a time before the smartphone era somewhat reduced their market power. Once it had enough users to benefit from network effects, its future was assured. It took Sun putting billions of dollars into promoting and supporting it to get there.
Sun's commitment to Java probably killed the company, in the end.
There were better-designed languages at the time, and there have been plenty of much better-designed languages since, that have or will fail to displace it. Rust might be counted among these.
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RMS is very critical of things and as much as I have great respect for him I cant just take his side without all the facts. I dont even know a single person paying for emacs today either way. Seems like an old beef thats dead as dead can be considering GNU Emacs seems to have won out. Unless you are Walter Bright, you do you sir, you are awesome! I guess same with Linus who uses Micro Emacs if I remember correctly. I…
RMS is a very black and white, tunnel visioned, ideologue: there's no gray. You can ask him his thoughts about a great new general technology and he'll stop you before you describe it and ask how it pertains to open source; if you don't answer exactly in alignment he will immediately dismiss you and shut down the conversation without hearing the question. (edit, I tried this once in person). He's absolutely correct,…
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I don't particularly like java. Most don't. But it's undeniably well designed. Some of its design choices have fallen out of favour in recent times—I still disagree with their elision of unsigned integers—but they're generally at least defensible .
No, it is not well designed. Just about every major feature has something incidentally or fundamentally wrong. It is proof that a language does not need to be good to succeed. But it does need a miracle. Java took off because it offered developers a path out of serfdom to Microsoft, at a time before the smartphone era somewhat reduced their market power. Once it had enough users to benefit from network effects, its f…
Can you give some examples of parts that are not well designed?
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James Gosling has contributed more to humanity than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived. I think he deserves better than this narrow, one-sided libel.
Really? By inventing Java?
> And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?
* https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/...
A follow-up noted:
> Yes! Java broke C++'s monopoly, and now C# is breaking Java's, and this sequence of broken monopolies dispelled the belief that have to use "the standard language", and now I code in Python for a living.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr%2e
Steele is/was well-acquainted with the bad parts of Java—he helped design Scheme after all. But in the alternative timeline where Java was not created, Java (and other machine-independent runtimes) would have not have become popular, and everyone would still be statically compiling C++.
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Really? By inventing Java?
"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele