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Comment by jf | Hacker News Reader

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox.

I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

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Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own VM and produced fast-launching executables.

In mid/late 90s words like "Oracle", "Sun", "Solaris" and "Java" were used predominantly by older fat-faced salesmen types, while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt young, modern and innovative. Gates and Allen were Brin and Page of the 90s.

I was doing some cool real-time data acquisition/analytics on Windows NT with C++ and MFC. Yes, it felt bad-ass. In my geek circles Borland was considered the most exciting software company at the time. Sun/Oracle and IBM with OS/2? Those were for banks and GM.

Sun hasn't changed since then. I have nothing to thank this company for, except that with Java, they dumbed down our profession to nearly data-entry status and introduced an intolerable boredom to the world of software hacking, something it was missing before 1995. I also believe Java suppressed the development and widespread adoption of Lisp, Smalltalk, ML and Haskell: before Java lots of folks couldn't use them because computers weren't powerful enough, but now they aren't using them because schools stopped teaching and switched to vocational java training.

I wasn't surprised Oracle bought them. Their "Oracle Forms" BS always sucked. With Java and armies of school-trained drones supplemented by Indian outsourcers they finally have a wonderful distribution channel to keep pushing their overpriced stuff through. I guess SAP could buy them too. I've been fortunate enough to avoid this market, so I won't be missing anything.

> while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt young, modern and innovative

Ah those where the days, I remember them fondly :)

Mostly tangential, but I have to code in MFC at the day job (legacy code base). God, the winapi guys must have had a sadistic sense of humor when they designed it. My guess is they were so used to low level programming that they saw object orientation as a crutch for the infirm. I imagine them shoving random subroutines into objects while laughing maniacally to themselves: "let's see these pansies make sense of DDX controls! muahaaha!"

I think you've got some causality messed up. I don't see how Java could have "dumbed down our profession." I think instead, schools turning vocational reduced the caliber of graduates while simultaneously pumping out large quantities of them.

It could have happened with just about any language. Java just happened to have a lot of things going for it that made it fit perfectly into the mold those vocational schools were looking for: simple memory management, platform abstraction, included libraries, and a large marketing effort creating jobs.

I remember when I was excited about Java. I was writing software for multiple platforms, and the thought of a write once, run everywhere was awesome. I felt so raped when it turned out to be a lie. I was so young and naive. :)

Now, I wish Java had never belched from the bowels of that leviathan. Even worse, I'm working at a game company, building an MMO, and using Java. Egads!

>before Java lots of folks couldn't use them because computers weren't powerful enough, but now they aren't using them because schools stopped teaching and switched to vocational java training.

Talk about self-denial. Java is definitely not the one to blame for lack of adoption of Lisp, Smalltalk, etc. Many other languages showed that it is possible to thrive despite perceived Java domination (I think that Java is not dominant, neither on desktop nor in web space, maybe in enterprise, but I wouldn't bet my money on it). And, after all, who cares about Java - use the tools you are proficient with, I know I do. Don't bitch about stuff you don't use.

In mid/late 90s I was working at MIT's university network (Athena) and my memory is similar, but different from yours. Perhaps because we weren't a Windows shop. I did actually work on a dual-boot x86 box sometimes, but the dual OSes were Linux and BSD.

We were still doing everything in C, but the cool kids I listened too were saying skip C++ if you want something OO but C-like and go straight to Java. So when I saw Per Bothner's Scheme-to-JVM compiler (Kawa) I knew my next implementation of BRL should use it.

What surprised me was the number of people at MIT who said, "Yuck, Scheme" when I was pushing it as the best syntax for web development (this after 12 years of me ignoring it in favor of C). I think a lot of people did not have a good experience going through 6.001 (SICP), even though other people, like me, loved it. I hate to say it, but what really suppressed the widespread adoption of Lisps may have been SICP.

You forgot Open Office which they bought and opened up and which has changed the competitive landscape in many ways. I'm struck by the number of non-geeks I know who use it daily.

SPARC was a great architecture, and the Sun workstations of yesteryear were where a lot of cutting edge research was done... It'll be interesting to see how many more OpenSolaris features Darwin picks up (ZFS?). It has dtrace already.

Darwin already pickup up ZFS. You can mount zfs volumes in OS X 10.5. You can patch the kernel module of OS X desktop to write to them (but don't, its really slow).

I use Open Office EVERY DAY. Let me say this.... succinctly:

OpenOffice the single worst piece of open source software available in any official repository. It is buggy, unfriendly, bloated, unreliable, and generally behaves in manners that do not make any sense. Crash and burn one boot, load fine the next.

Well, wasn't VirtualBox developed outside, then bought? But you forgot Self (it was done by Sun right?), and other cool things :)

Yes, you're correct about VirtualBox. And I left out many things from the long of stuff that they open sourced ...

Tcl and Tk went through Sun too, and picked up a lot of improvements along the way, and then got spit out in favor of Java as the only GUI platform.

And don't forget to mention MySQL. I just hope they'll keep it all alive or my apps are screwed!

Yes but they didn't build it. They bought it. Maybe to sweeten the deal for a buyer. MySql might not have sold to Oracle directly?

Correction, Sun might not have sold to Oracle directly if they didn't have MySQL on board...

Like this Oracle gets a very large number of extra contacts in the corporate database world.

So the world's third most popular database system acquires the second. So much for competition! http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/marketshare/

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