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James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

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Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#51

Post by sk2020 »

teddyh wrote: post #5

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…

Richard Stallman also earned quite a bit of infamy by blasting CSAIL with his “nuanced” views of pedophilia. Frankly, I don’t think much of his judgment of character.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#52

Post by imglorp »

morelisp wrote: post #45
imglorp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

There’s no way RMS asked you how something pertains to open source. :)

True, verbatim would be capital-F Free software.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#53

Post by yarg »

moonchild wrote: post #38
fishmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Generally - but signed bytes (at least as implemented) are really fucking stupid.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#54

Post by rauhl »

throw0101a wrote: post #49
fishmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? By inventing Java?

Guy Steele,[1] Java spec co-author, LL1 Mailing list (2003-08-21): > 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 bro…

> 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++.

I don’t know if that’s actually true. Computers were getting more and more powerful in the 90s, and hence more capable of supporting memory-managed and dynamic languages. Had Java not existed, I think that there’d be a very good change that Smalltalk or Lisp would have taken off instead. Indeed, looking at the late 90s, I think that there’s a good chance that the world would have gone with Smalltalk, and the computing industry would actually be light years ahead of where we are now.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#55

Post by disown »

pmcollins wrote: post #21
teddyh wrote: post #5

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…

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.

> James Gosling has contributed more to humanity than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived.

Not more than stallman though. Nowhere close to stallman.

> I think he deserves better than this narrow, one-sided libel.

Richard Stallman has contributed more to humanity than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived - including gosling. I think he deserves better than this narrow, one-sided libel. See how that goes. Or how about we let people have their say? Regardless of how much they contributed to humanity.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#57

Post by tomcam »

tyingq wrote: post #15
mherrmann wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there may also be another side to this story.

Here's at least part of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhrcxw/james_g... And a transcript if you don't like video: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... The Stallman stuff starts on page 30.

Gosling: Right. I mean, you can't sue a homeless person, right, which is, you know, he-- Yeah, he had sort of weird views on, you know, economic models at the time.

Weber: And personal hygiene.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#58

Post by shard972 »

disown wrote: post #55
pmcollins wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> James Gosling has contributed more to humanity than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived. Not more than stallman though. Nowhere close to stallman. > I think he deserves better than this narrow, one-sided libel. Richard Stallman has contributed more to humanity than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived - including gosling. I think he deserves better than this narrow, one-sided…

So you were happy for everyone to have their say about stallman and the consequences that be-felled him?

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#59

Post by saghm »

winrid wrote: post #47
ncmncm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rust and Java are so far apart it's not even funny. Can you give some examples of parts that are not well designed?

Not GP, but there's a type unsoundness bug with the fact that you can assign an array of a subtype to an array of a super type (apologies if my syntax is off; I haven't written Java in a while):

class Animal {} class Cat extends Animal {} class Dog extends Animal {}

Animal[] cats = new Cat[1]; Animal dog = new Dog(); cats[0] = dog;

This will compile fine but throw an error at runtime. The only possible way to avoid runtime errors with assigning a Cat array to an Animal array is if you only put Cats in it, at which point it would make more sense to just use a Cat array, so it would have been better design to make assigning a Cat array to an Animal array a compiler error.

Re: James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]

#60

Post by moonchild »

saghm wrote: post #59
winrid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust and Java are so far apart it's not even funny. Can you give some examples of parts that are not well designed?

Not GP, but there's a type unsoundness bug with the fact that you can assign an array of a subtype to an array of a super type (apologies if my syntax is off; I haven't written Java in a while): class Animal {} class Cat extends Animal {} class Dog extends Animal {} Animal[] cats = new Cat[1]; Animal dog = new Dog(); cats[0] = dog; This will compile fine but throw an error at runtime. The only possible way to avoid r…

Huh, I'm surprised the problem is present. Presumably this is valid?

  Animal[] a = new Animal[2];
  a[0] = new Dog();
  a[1] = new Cat();
If you can upcast Cat to Animal, why can Cat[] not be converted to Animal[] in the same way?
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