Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

eweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 115 posts

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#61

Post by rbanffy »

Tamerlin wrote: post #25
10ren wrote: post #21

Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor (Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit). They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless resources to acquire more: http://e…

" they own a great processor (Sparc)" I'm not so sure about that. For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better). Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's. Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days.…

> One company just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig

On the other hand, the Niagara family seems very interesting. Sadly, never had the chance to characterize its performance under my loads, but I suspect there is a lot of stuff they can do better than the same price x86 box.

A T3, with its many multi-threading cores resembles much more a "flock of chickens" than a Xeon does.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#63

Post by rbanffy »

scorpion032 wrote: post #55
ajaxian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers. The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going t…

Working for Oracle as a programmer _most often means_ working for innumerable number of ERP and middleware solutions they offer, not the database itself.

I don't think that has too much appeal either. Quite frankly, I would prefer the 80's C to that.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#64

Post by rbanffy »

varjag wrote: post #45
ajaxian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers. The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going t…

Not arguing with the rest of your post, but what would you write a large-scale DBMS with, these days? Surely not jpython?

Perhaps with 2010 style C ;-)

But maybe, just maybe, I would first connect Oracle's prodigious moneyduct into a team writing a kick-ass Lisp compiler and then writing the best RDBMS using Lisp.

One can dream...

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#65

Post by rbanffy »

b-man wrote: post #60
ajaxian wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I didn't intend to diss C, and if one were to write Oracle from scratch today, C is (sadly?) still probably the best option given its performance and portability constraints. What I had in mind was that for anyone who is technically capable of maintaining the core Oracle DB code base, there are more interesting and rewarding things they could be doing instead.

I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety. Then I would check the performance bottlenecks and rewrite them in C if needed. Then I would use a more programmer friendly language on top of that. Something like Scheme, Ruby, Python and the like. Stratified design, basically.

> I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety

I am not sure about Haskell, but, from my limited experience, Erlang runs at levels very close to C (my C, at least)

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#66

Post by rbanffy »

sshah wrote: post #54

JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace. Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its…

You obviously make the risky assumption the managers in question know how to properly document and develop software.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#67

Post by strlen »

jbjohns wrote: post #26
yellowbkpk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.

I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when as a technical person you have no track anyway?

Most companies do have technical career path. Being a permanent employee not only gives you the benefits (others have listed them), but also lets you work on much more interesting projects (contractors typically work on isolated projects rather than on core systems and algorithms; I know, of course, of exceptions to that but they're rare). It also frees you up of the overhead of finding the next contract.

I know many people who have done contracting and several told me a) the money _is_ very good b) other than the money, it's not worth it (stressful, uninteresting projects, high overhead).

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#68

Post by docgnome »

jrockway wrote: post #52
CamperBob wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.

Oh, I agree 100%. The software industry barely understands software (see also: offshoring), so I simply don't expect a non-software company to even be in the ballpark. Big companies assume software projects will be failures, and treat their employees accordingly. Then they get what they expect. (Hire a bunch of good programmers with good management, and you can get amazingly reliable software from a team of two. Hire…

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones. This is pointed out constantly on HN and in other programming communities. I'm curious though if anyone has any hard data to support this, beyond anecdotal evidence. (I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I agree completely. I'm just interested in seeing any studies done on the subject. I imagine this applies to many other fields as well.)

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#69

Post by whatusername »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

From the middle of the article: "Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make mor…

IBM and SUN had tons of competing products. They compete in: OS's - Solaris vs AIX; Hardware - Sun's Low end x86 vs systemX, SPARC vs Power, Disk Storage, Tape Storage; And probably a bunch more I can't think of.

Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#70

Post by VladRussian »

a lot of Sun's prima donnas didn't make it in Oracle wolf pack. They had their day at Sun (it was an unbelievable feast during plague), and it resulted in the failure of the company on all fronts, business and engineering, software and hardware.
Post reply on HN