Early Days of Java in Sun Labs – Chuck McManis on HN, via Manuel Simoni
Wednesday 30 March 2011 - Filed under computers + programming
From The Axis of Eval: “Truth IS stranger than fiction”: Chuck McManis explains the cancellation and subsequent fame of Java.
It’s fascinating to me how often you hear about these overnight successes that took years to develop and were canceled, given up for dead, etc. many times.
I remember hearing similar stories about Self and Erlang at HOPL-3, the History of Programming Languages conference. Maybe you shouldn’t bet on the success of a new language unless it’s been cancelled or abandoned at least once?
2011-03-30 » mike
31 March 2011 @ 12:54 am
I worked at Sun, though not in Java development, and the last manager I had there forced me to support the IDE for java. I balked for a couple of reasons. 1) Java is not accessible to visually impaired programmers. Its camel naming convention and syntax is very unfriendly to the disabled, and 2) The class library structure is a disaster, the thickness of any comprehensive handbook, i.e. the O’Reily Nutshell book, is a metric of the complexity shoved out to class libraries, a pitfall of OO design, and not remedied to date. Other Object Programming systems do not abuse the idea as much. I had hoped that when Java went open source that developers would look at a much better design of class libraries in general.