Well, if you are so sure it's not just enterprise then it's easy to prove, right

Posted Aug 31, 2010 9:18 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: It's easy, actually... by lenov
Parent article: Google bails out of JavaOne

Who am-I then?

Opportunist, I presume.

I am on LWN, aren't I? And I have been here for years.

Well, Java people tried to coopt FOSS people for years. When FOSS people pointed out that Java is a trap Java people explained that it's not a big deal because there are lots of free Java (funny how the same approach of Adobe is universally hated and Flex-developers are usually despised while Java people always tried to pretend "they are FOSS people too"). Not unlike KDE spat, really. Few years ago Sun finally decided to free Java and the wall started to crumble: FOSS distributions started to allow Java packages, there were even talks that Vala is bad idea because we have Java, etc. But Oracle stopped and reversed it to a huge degree.

As a matter of fact, every single line of code I wrote for the last 13 years has been under GPL. Every single line of code produced in my group, 95% being in Java, is under GPL.

Well, that's what amazes me the most in Java people: they produce lots of free code, they try to play friends with FOSS community, yet they are happy to build the castle on the sand (proprietary base owned initially by Sun and later by Oracle). This looks like FOSS camp: we use GPL because it's good business strategy, we don't care about freedom at all. Yet Java people are often becoming angry when they are excluded from FOSS community. But actions speak louder than words and because of "original sin" FOSS community will perceive Java people as outsiders for a long, long, long time. C/C++ people are different: while it's true that many of them started with proprietary compilers and proprietary tools they embraced free replacement (GCC) wholeheartedly - but Java people never actually accepted free Java (before Android, that is). I don't know how many times I've heard from Java community "stop wasting our time with your inferior tools" (or words to that effect) when GCJ, Kaffe or any other free replacement was mentioned. This put Java firmly in "people who don't care about freedom" category - and that category lies outside of FOSS community.

That's how today we have two communities: "proper FOSS" community and "Java community". People from second camp perceive themselves as parts of FOSS community, but people from first camp rarely accede such privilege to them. When RedHat bought JBoss it was perceived as betrayal at first but then RedHat redeemed itself with it's IcedTea work. But release of IcedTea (and later OpenJDK) only started healing the chasm between FOSS community and Java community. It's slow process: KDE people are still not perceived as "fully FOSS people" even if their "original sin" was rectified by Trolltech and Nokia long ago. This is easy to understand: former slaves which fought for freedom and obtained it with blood and tears will long view complacent slaves who were freed just because lord decided that he does not like to keep these particular slaves as slaves with suspicion.

Sorry but you do not know what you are talking about.

I hear this from Java people a lot. But somehow proof never materializes. If Java is "everywhere" then it should be easy to point on the concrete examples, right. Where are they? It's easy to point to these monstrous bloated "enterprise solutions", but if you take a wider look on where FOSS thrives it's hard to see any Java there. Mobile? It was mostly used by "enterprise-oriented Blackberry" while "Java for everyone" (JavaME) was not all that popular and shrank fast. Network equipment? Well, there are some tools where Java is used for configuration - and it's almost as lame as IE6-only HTML. The only place where Java hits the normal person today is bank authentication and even there it becomes less and less popular. So... if we exclude enterprise and wannabe enterprise solutions, then... where is Java? Please don't answer with "you don't know anything", if it's some important component then surely it's known to everyone who deals with this technology...

I am not part of a commercial company. Java is everywhere around here.

And here is... where exactly? How many millions of users are using your technologies?

Java is too heavy for most users. Where you have power to spare it's not as important - and there Java is popular. But these are small niches: Enterprise, HPC, may be some science. Where price of computer is not important because it's attached to some uber-expensive piece. But where people actually care about efficiency... Java is quite scarce.

You are working in a certain domain/environment, and maybe there, Java is not a language of choice. But there are places where it is.

Actually where I work Java is quite popular. On "big iron". Where we can easily add the hardware to compensate for waste generated by Java. But on client side... only Android developers are using Java - and that's not real Java, it's slightly different beast...

Well, if you are so sure it's not just enterprise then it's easy to prove, right

Posted Aug 31, 2010 16:33 UTC (Tue) by lenov (guest, #15428) [Link] (1 responses)

" Who am-I then?

Opportunist, I presume."

Is insulting people your only way of interaction, or is-this just on LWN?

"Well, Java people tried to coopt FOSS people for years"

What? What do-you mean by "Java people"? What is a Java person? I started my programming life with Pascal, then moved to Labview, then C, then Perl and now I am hardly coding anymore but the people I supervise are using Python and Java (and I do not mention LaTeX and other FOSS efforts outside strictly programming languages). Who do-you think you are to categorize people like that? I am not talking about the current thread here. Seriously, you must think a bit about the way you view the world and treat people.

"Well, that's what amazes me the most in Java people: they produce lots of free code, they try to play friends with FOSS community,"

Here we go again. "Java People" "play friends with FOSS community". WTF??!!! Except if you are RMS, I probably produced FOSS while you did not even know how to program. Play friends with FOSS community!!! To me!!! Who introduced FOSS in about every place I went because they never heard of it. Jeez you have a very very high opinion of yourself don't you?

"and because of "original sin" FOSS community will perceive Java people as outsiders for a long, long, long time. C/C++ people are different: while it's true that many of them started with proprietary compilers and proprietary tools they embraced free replacement (GCC) wholeheartedly - but Java people never actually accepted free Java"

OK, sorry, forget about all the above. Clearly you are either a complete lunatic, or you are 12 years old.

Sorry but you do not know what you are talking about.

"I hear this from Java people a lot. But somehow proof never materializes. If Java is "everywhere" then it should be easy to point on the concrete examples, right. Where are they? "

OK, first of all, if you write "Java people" one more time, I ask LWN to help find you and I sue you for racial discrimination. Second, here are *a few* examples (listen script kiddie, you have to realize that I spend a huge amount of money just spending time to reply to you, so please, stop being an absolute idiot and listen OK? You did not listen to mommy, you did not listen to daddy, you did not listen to your teachers, for ONCE IN YOUR LIFE stop thinking you are smarter than the entire world. This IS NOT TRUE. Hard to accept, but once you do, you will realize that your relationship with your fellow human beings improve a lot)

The most used alternative to MS office
http://www.openoffice.org/

The most used software in functional network biology
http://www.cytoscape.org/

The most used software in system biology
http://www.celldesigner.org/

A *few* others (a few among hundreds, but the purpose is just an illustration OK? )
http://www.biouml.org/
http://www.biotapestry.org/
http://www.pathwayeditor.org/
http://www.async.ece.utah.edu/iBioSim/
http://physiome.org/jsim/
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/compneur-srv/SBMLeditor.html
http://smartcell.crg.es/
http://vanted.ipk-gatersleben.de

That is only one subfield of life sciences. Now I got bored. I let you explore the other fields of life sciences, and the other type of sciences (use Google :-) ) You will discover several thousands end-user applications written in Java, used by several hundreds thousands users. I will not venture millions, because I do not know.

"But these are small niches: Enterprise, HPC, may be some science. Where price of computer is not important because it's attached to some uber-expensive piece. But where people actually care about efficiency... Java is quite scarce."

Ah ah ah. So, people in science and HPC do not care about efficiency right? Do-you just read what you write?

And Enterprise, HPC and science are "small" niches. OK, fine, let us in our niches. Jeez.

Well, if you are so sure it's not just enterprise then it's easy to prove, right

Posted Sep 9, 2010 12:25 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

lenov, it sounds like maybe you are a FOSS person and a java person, but really Khim is quite right that for a long time the two groups were largely separated by the Java licence. I know I spent years not using it because I couldn't, even though this was quite inconvenient (one very interesting/relevant app was written in Java).

Open JDK has enormously improved the situation, (so I have now packaged and used the app in question, and in fact it now also works with the gcj stuff too).

But railing at Khim because you don't like what he is saying doesn't really help your case. Java is still peripheral in Free Software, although apparently it is popular in science. I have seen it in a couple of control apps (DIYzoning, Mango - which were great but I entirely failed to get to build and run on ARM last time I tried, so I went elsewhere)

I guess you are right that a lot of 'special purpose' software is written in Java, but very little core stuff. Most of those things are 'niches', but it's true that if you add all the niches together (biology, physics, building design, cave surveying, etc, etc) the total perhaps cannot really be described as 'niche' overall. I don't know how to do that calculation - there is so much software in the world now I'm not sure anyone is counting it anymore :-). From where I'm standing more and more of it is being done in Python instead these days, but I can only see into a few niches.

Well, if you are so sure it's not just enterprise then it's easy to prove, right

Posted Aug 31, 2010 16:55 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Java is too heavy for most users. Where you have power to spare it's not as important - and there Java is popular. But these are small niches: Enterprise, HPC, may be some science

In my experience, very little actual HPC is done with Java. Generally, it's C, C++, and FORTRAN, assisted by OpenMP, MPI, various linear algebra packages, and CUDA.

That said, I'm not at all opposed to it in some places, e.g. cross-platform GUI to do scientific visualization. It's also used in some monitoring applications, iirc. Generally, in HPC, you're trying to squeeze performance from every cycle you can; you don't want to waste it if you possibly can avoid it. HPC doesn't have the luxury of throwing away CPU as you indicate, because that would raise the power and cooling requirements which are already stretched, and decrease the FLOPS. I've seen it shown that Java floating-point isn't any slower than C or C++ floating-point (likely true depending on compiler choice and flags; you can get pretty big changes depending on your compiler and flags) but to my knowledge it's never really caught on so it keeps on not catching on (rather like FORTRAN 90 or 95 not catching on despite how hard FORTRAN 77 sucks). Also, the (in?)availability of mathematical packages (they're there, but relatively unknown and untested and thus untrusted) for it also hampers.

It could also be bigger in areas I don't have experience in (I'm a physicist, although my HPC experience comes primarily through workshops at our university's supercomputing center (which isn't a small one), so not specifically physics. I've not attended e.g. the Supercomputing Conferences, though, so it's possible I've just not been exposed to a wide enough HPC setting.