So much for that “Speak no ill of the dead” thing, when it comes to Steve Jobs.
3 thoughts on “Well, I Guess It’s Been Long Enough”
Comments are closed.
So much for that “Speak no ill of the dead” thing, when it comes to Steve Jobs.
Comments are closed.
No shit, Sherlock. The recent hagiographic extolling of Jobs was because he died, what Rex Stout called approximately (I don’t have the book here with me), “the honeyed unction that men smear on a corpse out of their own fear of death”.
I’ve often said that, as bad as Gates is, if Jobs (or Larry Ellison) had been CEO of Microsoft, he’d have sent hit men after Linus Torvalds.
Wow, that was a “largely friendly” biography?
And I thought I was premature with my suggestion for an epitaph: iDied.
Yes, speak to me of Larry Ellison.
This blog, I infer, is about the intersection of tech with politics and hences the rest of society beyond the deliberations of the experts in tech, be it rockets or computers. Hence my following assertion is on topic to this thread and to this blog.
George Gilder once asserted that the Java computer language/platform was the great tech breakthrough of our generation. I assert that the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle and the Java language/platform along with it was the greatest piece of damage done by the Global Economic Crisis/Great Recession of ’08.
Who is George Gilder and what makes him an authority on programming languages, of which there have been so many over the years? George Gilder, I guess, is someone who writes about social trends, perhaps from a Conservative-Libertarian-Optimist perspective, and his optimism perhaps gives folks the impression that he was a partisan shill for Reagan when Mr. Gilder was waxing eloquently about the Reagan Tax Cuts and Supply Side Economics.
That Mr. Gilder was expressing similar optimistic eloquence about Java suggests that Mr. Gilder is about Mr. Gilder rather than a political faction within the Conservative Movement as I did not know that the Right/Left Traditionalist/Libertarian divides split along native code/virtual machine lines. At the time I read Mr. Gilder expressing that sentiment on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I thought him to be a fool as we all know there is No Silver Bullet (Brooks, Mythical Man Month) to the Software Problem.
But maybe George Gilder was on to something, that I as a very late adopter of Java for software I develop in my engineering research was late to see. Mr. Gilder, observing how Java had claimed mind share of software in banking, was observing something that research-academic software developers ranging from Leroy Hood to the HEP Consortium of CERN, SLAC, and LLNL would come to realize (check out the FreeHEP Web site and the library package Vector Graphics).
No, Java is not the Silver Bullet, and if you are pursuing some other path, perhaps a native-code path to interplatform and software interoperation bliss, perhaps Python/TKInter or something else, I do not want to enter into a flame war about whether Java is lame. But Java is indeed a Good Thing ™, and as I get more experience with it, I begin to rely on its instrinsic features rather than program an it as if it were simply a dialect of C++ or Delphi Pascal.
Another data point is that I have a neighbor across the street who is a software developer turned manager, who once suggested to me that whereas software development is supposed to operate in “Internet time”, that is very rapidly to get the jump on the competition, especially during the late great Dot Com Boom, in his words a “good, reusable OO software module may take as long as 10 years or more to get right.”
Java is a bunch of things — it is a language, a VM, it is also a library (cough, Swing, cough), it is a platform for a developer to implement OO libraries, and it is an eco-system of interoperable libraries shared among developers (VectorGraphics of the CERN-SLAC-LLNL High Energy Physics Consortium, Matlab — not that well-known to be a Java scripting language, but a powerful one it is). That sort of thing takes years, no, decades to evolve, and we are only into the second decade of the general availibility of a free (in some sense if not the pure Stallmanist way) multi-platform-OO-garbage collected-Swiss Army knife library-widely adopted software ecosystem to even begin to realize the Gilderesque goodness to society from such a piece of tech.
Sun Microsystems treated Java as a labor of love, as its only beloved child to which it devoted its entire being, with some mystery as to how Java was to make Sun any money (Joel Spolsky had an essay explaining it better than I can right here). And now, boom!, Java has Larry Ellison as its foster dad. And this happened because of the Great Recession, and it cannot be unwound, the relationship between Sun and Java is something lost to history, much as the devotion of AT&T to basic scientific research through Bell Labs, which was an accident of the pre-deregulation telecom environment.
Was Steve Jobs a tyrant? I imagine that even the most outwardly meek among great captains of industry have that side to them. Was Steve Jobs a genius? I guess, but maybe Jobs played Edison-with-the-good-publicity-machine to the Tesla-who-developed-the-AC-tech-that-did-the-heavy-lifting of a Wirth, Gosling, Torvald, Hejlsberg, Ritchie, Wall, Stroustrup, or a van Rossum.