Key People Matter
Weiqi says:
The point? Java has survived in the face of all these public high profile separations. It will live on past this one.
I don’t think “Java” will die because one key engineer left Sun. Weiqi gives a list of important people who left Sun, and of course Java is still around.
Something May Suffer
While Java won’t die, individual initiatives may suffer. For example, now that Peter Ahé no longer works for Sun, who is championing the idea to erase erasure in Java 7? As far as we know, nobody. This makes part of me die inside.
I find myself wondering if maybe Sun would have continued advocating and promoting Jini if Bill Joy, the “father of Jini”, hadn’t left Sun. Who knows.
For a non-Sun example, take a look at Jython. Jython was a revolutionary step towards bringing scripting languages to the JVM — YEARS before today’s efforts with other languages like JRuby. UPDATE: See Alan Kennedy’s comment below. Yet when the Jython creator accepted a job at Microsoft, look how long it took for others to step up and revitalize Jython. It’s damn hard to pick up the pieces when the tech lead leaves.
For yet another example, take a look at the hit HSQLDB took when Thomas Mueller left the project. Again, it took years for another team to pick up the pieces and fully get back on track.
What will Die?
I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Certainly not Java. But news like this does make me nervous, that’s all I’m saying. Here is why…
- Back in the old days, Sun heavily promoted Java on the desktop. JavaBeans were HUGE in the old days.
- Then came EJB. For many years, Sun lost interest in the desktop. Flash kicked our asses and today dominates.
- Only recently, Sun regained interest in client Java. Probably because key people in Sun strongly advocated this initiative.
- Now one of these key people just left Sun.
Best of all, Chet’s own words:
One of the things that attracted me to Flex, and to Adobe, was a client platform that enables very rich user experiences; transitions, animations, filters, and just darned good-looking UIs are all pretty exciting to this graphics geek.
So…Java didn’t offer enough of those things?
Disclaimer
I don’t know anything. I’m just blogging. You know, writing down my thoughts and ideas. In my opinion, everybody is replaceable.
It is also my opinion that when important people move on, the organization’s focus shifts to reflect the priorities of the replacement people.
And finally, I think it made for a good comic. That’s all.
Admission - Glazed Lists development has slowed significantly since I left Swing to work on webapps.
Good thing that there are still very good engineers at Sun (or outside Sun) working for client side Java. Joshua Marinacci, Dimitri Trembovski, Chris Campbell, Ethan Nicholas, Kirill Grouchnikov are a few to count.
You’ve got the history of jython wrong.
Jim Hugunin left the jython project very early on, in the jython 1.5 days (anyone remember that?); Jim left the python world, and went off to work on AspectJ.
Up to version 2.1, it was Finn Bock and Samuele Pedroni who maintained jython, and brought it up to version 2.1. (And IMHO, made jython a much more reliable product than it had ever been before).
Jim H only came back to the python world after disillusionment with AOP. There was a “meme” a couple of years ago that the MS CLR was unsuitable for dynamic languages. Jim prototyped a small python interpreter for the CLR, and proved that the meme was wrong. The day he published his paper about it, MS were on the phone offering him a job; the rest is history.
Jython stalled for all those years because both Finn and Samuele moved onto other things; Jim was long gone before jython 2.0.
Languages are quite immortal. They dont really die, they just decline in popularity.
I think Java will still be a solid choice but on the other hand people will look for alternatives more as well.
Hopefully other languages can catch up on this.
There is one possibility which may bode well for Swing.
In business, entrepreneurs are famous for leaving a company once it is successful, because they enjoy the challenge and culture of start-ups. Once a project has “made it”, they get bored.
I have no idea, but perhaps Chet feels Swing is mature and wants to get into something new. He talks about the novelty in the comments on his blog.
Also he says the coffee is better at Adobe. He’s a good punster but I think he missed this pun/Freudian slip (coffee = Java?
Michael: Good point, I completely missed that obvious pun. I weep for missed joke opportunities. My only defense is working within Java for years numbed me to the use of the term in coffee humor. It just gets old after the first 5 years or so.
But perhaps I should rephrase my comment to be more pun-friendly: “Sun has better Java, but Adobe has better coffee.”
Eric: For what it’s worth, I found the comic funny. Surreal and patently untrue, but funny. And hey, I’m all for funny.
Thomas Mueller may have left HSQLDB, but I think his new efforts in H2 (www.h2database.com/) cast that in a positive light. It seems to me, overall, that H2 is a much better product than HSQLDB, and is certainly more actively maintained.
In the grand scheme of things, if good people leave a project, and move on to something else, so long as the “something else” is of equal or better value, the net loss is nill and the gain may be positive.