Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour
by jen20 on Friday May 27, 2016 @06:37PM
(#11789549)
> an IDE that was not unusably slow and buggy
Can't argue about the UI stack in general, but IntelliJ is a dream compared to anything Microsoft have ever produced.
Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour
by Zigurd on Saturday May 28, 2016 @09:03AM
(#11791490)
I'm talking about Forte, circa 2000. That's when Sun sued Microsoft over Visual J++.
Forte later became NetBeans and today it is fine but it was rubbish back then especially compared to Microsoft's tool chain.
Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour
by brianwawok on Saturday May 28, 2016 @09:39AM
(#11791623)
Oh because what microsoft did with the web standards with IE5 and IE6 did so much for the web world - it only took what, 10 years to undo the damage? Think if they corrupted early Java in the same way? C# would not exist, but Java would likely be a steaming pile of crap.
Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour
by Zigurd on Saturday May 28, 2016 @12:31PM
(#11792240)
Interactive Java was a steaming pile of crap. Have you ever used an awt UI? Has anyone ever successfully coded a Swing UI? Java IDEs, other than Visual J++, needed insanely powerful machines just to come up in less than 10 minutes.
This is what it took to make interactive Java successful in Android: Subtract cross-platformness, add a runtime designed for a specific OS architecture, add a nice UI stack, and add modularity to apps that makes component lifecycle useful to running apps efficiently. Among other mods. Android "corrupted" the fuck out of Java which was absolutely nowhere as a language for interactive software.
Oracle should have gotten on the bandwagon.
Visual J++ was a very usable Java. Had Sun failed to sue it out of existence, the world would have had a Java with a good UI stack developers actually used, an IDE that was not unusably slow and buggy, AND almost all packages built for Sun's Java would drop right in without problems. Visual J++ would have created the same effect on the use of Java that Android did, but it would have happened approximately 10 years earlier.
Sun's suit was tremendously destructive of a very useful product that would have helped the cause of Java's wide use. Unnecessary, spiteful, and an own-goal.
EDIT: And less VB, and more Windows applications software running in a managed language runtime, years earlier.