The Goldfish Chronicles

Joseph Ottinger and Lance both commented to my linking to Paul Graham’s article. I was replying in the comment bit, but it got long, so here’s the whole reply:

He begins by saying he has no clue about the technical issues of Java, that what he is trying to display is the idea of sniffing out a bad technology.

Also, bear in mind that the article is 2 years old. So a slightly different world. Indeed, before Java ‘hackers’ were as large a group as they are now.

#1 Hyped: I think this bears merit. A technology which is hyped by your manager before your colleagues smells dubious.

#2 Aimed Low: This is the one that irritated me. But probably because I like to think that I can at least compete intellectually with the majority of us programmers out there. If not grammatically.

#3 Ulterior motives: The open-source crowd originally hated Java for its Sun ownership. Sun continue to show that Java exists for the large corporates, not for the tiny developers.

#4 No one loves it: I don’t know. I _prefer_ Java. But I don’t love it, not in the way that perl people I know love perl. A lot of Java developers I know are that way, they don’t love Java, however there’s nothing else out there better. I think most of us are waiting for Java’s successor to finish the work it started. I used to love Rebol, but it was owned by one company and was never freed. I used to love Perl, but it doesn’t seem to support a large enough industry of dedicated programmers.

#5 Forced to use it: This is a bit dated. It’d be ‘forced to use C#’ now. As far asVenture Capital goes, Java seems a bit like Oracle, it makes the VC wet.

#6 Too many cooks: The JCP does seem this way. I imagine that behind the big locked doors of the JCP, the big companies, Sun, HP, BEA, IBM must be in constant wars.

#7 Bureaucratic: I don’t get this one. I’m not sure if he means Sun, the APIs or the effort needed to get ‘Hello World’. But it would fit anyone of those topics.

#8 Pseudo-hip: Well, it is. Java has continued since 2001 to portray itself as a middle ground between MS and open-source.

#9 Large organisations: They rule Java. The JCP is dominated by these, Apache is accused of being dominated by these.

#10 Wrong people like Java: Difficult to accept this one.

#11 Sun are screwed: Here we can all happily go “But we have Daddy IBM!”. Which I don’t think is good. “Free Java!”

#12 DOD Likes it: I think this is some old ADA/Lisp thing coming back. Unsure.

Overall I like the article, and Paul Graham’s articles in general, because they make me think. It accurately portrayed a lot of how Java looks to me [with a few exceptions].

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 30th, 2003 at 9:00 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.