[lug] Software patents

[Nate Duehr]

On Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:59:04 -0600, "Lee Woodworth"
<blug-mail at duboulder.com> said:
> Nate Duehr wrote:
> > I'm not even going to guess why Java took off... it's about the most  
> > bloated crap I've ever seen.  Marketing money I guess.  It doesn't do  
> > anything that a good developer library and some discipline in code  
> > writing couldn't accomplish ten years earlier.  Its appeal still  
> > baffles me.
> 
> When was the last time you seriously looked at it? Do you know what
> dependency injection is? ORM (which is being copied for .net)? ....

No, not really.  I'm not a developer.  But it wouldn't matter for the
question anyway.  "Why did Java take off?" would be better translated in
my mind's eye as... "What was so compelling about Java Version 1 that it
gained a following in the first place?  I did some programming in it,
and it was a mess."

I said nothing about today's use of Java.  Obviously it gained
usefulness over time, but so have other languages.  Take for example,
Python... why choose Java over Python?

For me, it's just a curiosity.  I've been in Customer Support roles now
for almost 20 years.  All the continuous changes of language seem to do
in the final result at the "output" of the software "engineering
process" from my "sitting between the customer and the engineer who
doesn't want to talk to them" perspective -- is more bugs -- every time
the major platforms under products change.  

Some of the products I support haven't really changed their major
requirements since I started working on them in the early 90s, but the
engineers keep making the same mistakes on new
hardware/software/development platforms, over and over and over again. 
I find that fascinating.

(Luckily those mistakes aren't show-stoppers all that often, but they
ARE essentially the same mental mistakes, made by different engineers,
over and over.  They don't MEAN to do it, of course... but it's just
what I've seen over the course of a "career" so far.  The absolute
number one screwup in EVERY piece of software I've supported over two
decades root-cause is "Lack of bounds checking".  More bugs from not
checking the corner cases than any other big-picture "mental mistakes",
looking back mentally over the thousands of trouble reports I've worked
over the years...)

I just study and watch developers and development trends to stay ahead
of what bugs and types of bugs I'm going to see next... (GRIN)... Senior
Tech Support roles are a never-ending hamster wheel, but usually they
pay pretty well... if the never-ending nature of the same bug TYPES over
and over and over again, no matter what company or product you work on,
doesn't get under your skin... and you can learn about how long it takes
to fix those types of things (again and again), you can keep customers
calm and happy.  Anyone who actually wants to FIX something for good,
might be really frustrated by technical support roles... you might be
waiting a LONG time for this industry to start acting like REAL
engineers with standards, and "building codes" (double entendre' is
cute, isn't it?), real PE certification testing for "software
engineers", etc.

So anyway... Java... why did it "work" for engineers?  I know the
schools IMMEDIATELY started pushing it from Acaedemia (try finding a
beginning programming course in C these days, versus Java...) back in
the 90's, but something caused them to think that was "the way to go"...
I never saw a compelling reason for it other than marketing hype, back
in the Java 1 days.  Oooh, big deal, it cleans up memory for you... were
we already putting out coders who were that lazy by 1995 or so?  Keeping
track of memory doesn't seem that difficult... I have to do it when I
write code for embedded microcontrollers in Assembly...  (GRIN!)

Nate 
--
  Nate Duehr
  nate at natetech.com