Paul Murphy recently wrote a piece where he made the worst insult a Unix person can make about any technology used in Unix environments. He called Java “Windows on Unix.” Next up, Paul Murphy will call Dallas residents New Yorkers in cowboy hats, and accuse Hillary Clinton of being a fan of William F. Buckley.
But hey, every interest group has an enemy, and for old-school Unix types, hatred of Microsoft is knitted into the fabric of their cardigan sweaters. What moved me to respond, however, was what I consider to be an inaccurate portrayal of the Java environment. Granted, I’m a Microsoft employee and think .NET is the best thing since sliced bread. I am also, however, a programmer who spent seven years on and off doing various kinds of Java work.
The core problem in Murphy’s piece is that he seems to have bought into Sun’s former marketing, believing that Java is merely a means by which to ensure a program can be “written once and run anywhere.” Yes, James Gosling and his team of developers at Sun originally designed Java (then named “Oak”) as a platform to run within Set-Top Boxes with an eye towards making it easy to write one program that executes on multiple types of hardware. And yes, Java has found itself into other devices where cross-platform support is important, such as cell phones, and even Blu-ray players.
Sun did make a pitch to turn the Java runtime into a common layer targeted at desktop computers that would make it easy to run an application on any Java-supporting platform using one common set of “bytecodes” (the object oriented assembly language, of sorts, that defines the instructions in a Java application…not that most people would have to generate that code themselves, as that is what a Java compiler is for). That effort, however, never really went very far.
But hey, every interest group has an enemy, and for old-school Unix types, hatred of Microsoft is knitted into the fabric of their cardigan sweaters. What moved me to respond, however, was what I consider to be an inaccurate portrayal of the Java environment. Granted, I’m a Microsoft employee and think .NET is the best thing since sliced bread. I am also, however, a programmer who spent seven years on and off doing various kinds of Java work.
The core problem in Murphy’s piece is that he seems to have bought into Sun’s former marketing, believing that Java is merely a means by which to ensure a program can be “written once and run anywhere.” Yes, James Gosling and his team of developers at Sun originally designed Java (then named “Oak”) as a platform to run within Set-Top Boxes with an eye towards making it easy to write one program that executes on multiple types of hardware. And yes, Java has found itself into other devices where cross-platform support is important, such as cell phones, and even Blu-ray players.
Sun did make a pitch to turn the Java runtime into a common layer targeted at desktop computers that would make it easy to run an application on any Java-supporting platform using one common set of “bytecodes” (the object oriented assembly language, of sorts, that defines the instructions in a Java application…not that most people would have to generate that code themselves, as that is what a Java compiler is for). That effort, however, never really went very far.
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