Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-like industry Research and Development centers (not just research shops or application software vendors) remain?
Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you. Microsoft Research does not ship code. IBM and HP are professional services, not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very positively) driving the direction of Java EE, but they're much more of a consulting/software vendor (focused on enterprise software, not on programming languages) than an R&D shop.
Google would be the most likely candidate: they use Java extensively, make their own JVM and contribute to Apache Harmony. They do highly advanced R&D work (you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs), but most fruits of it are internal (with some work ending up as research papers and a very tiny fraction going out as open source).
Seems like something is missing: a first-class R&D shop that's a home to top technologists (who aren't interested wealth through entrepreneurship, but would rather work on many different, challenging projects -- something focused start-ups can't provide) and which ships software and hardware to the world. I'd love to see Google step up to that plate, but is that realistic?
Microsoft funds a lot of fairly pure research with some of it slipping out into the real world, e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ of Glasgow Haskell Compiler fame (and perhaps the most interesting interview in Coders at Work, although that has a lot to do with my familiarity of the work of others in the Lisp and PARC worlds).
One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft Research (or whatever it's called) was how little gets out of the lab into the "real world", with things like F# being recent exceptions, and their funding of the GHC is another example of how they indirectly ship code. Although this mostly legit complaint is precisely your complaint about "not just research shops".
I'm pretty sure IBM is still doing some tech R&D, how much in the coding area I'm not sure, let alone for how long.
Hmmm, has such a beast other than Sun for a brief time ever existed? Obviously Bell Labs, and the UCB Unix project (and some other DARPA projects that had useful code as a required deliverable, e.g. their general VLSI infrastructure push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project). MIT's exokernel project found itself reified in the real world as Xen, through yet another university lab.
Plus today there are other business models, e.g. look at Clojure (admittedly a one man project for the first few years), the cost of doing a R&D project that ships real world code is fantastically lower than it used to be when e.g. XEROX PARC was doing most? of its work on bit slice (i.e. not too fast) 16 bit Altos with 1-4 banks of 64KB RAM.
I came to the conclusion in the early '80s that some of the differences in the granularity of traditional Lisp and Smalltalk objects (the latter are larger) is in part due to the machines these people did their work on. Lisp has always gone for a big flat address space, Smalltalk had bank switching to contend with an I think that encouraged larger objects (larger than a cons cell, atom, numeric immediate, etc.
The architecture of X has a lot more to do with GAO "most preferred customer" rules/law than anything else.
No surprise? Java is pretty big stuff in the corporate world that Oracle operates in, and had to be part of why they bought Sun. You wonder just what they're doing to piss off people like this so much.
On the topic of Java, anyone know what's happening with the Java app store? No doubt it will fail to reach critical mass with the public, but it's a shame. Had Java had a more presentable front end and Sun been more commercial they could have started the trend for apps many years back.
[+] [-] strlen|16 years ago|reply
Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you. Microsoft Research does not ship code. IBM and HP are professional services, not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very positively) driving the direction of Java EE, but they're much more of a consulting/software vendor (focused on enterprise software, not on programming languages) than an R&D shop.
Google would be the most likely candidate: they use Java extensively, make their own JVM and contribute to Apache Harmony. They do highly advanced R&D work (you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs), but most fruits of it are internal (with some work ending up as research papers and a very tiny fraction going out as open source).
Seems like something is missing: a first-class R&D shop that's a home to top technologists (who aren't interested wealth through entrepreneurship, but would rather work on many different, challenging projects -- something focused start-ups can't provide) and which ships software and hardware to the world. I'd love to see Google step up to that plate, but is that realistic?
[+] [-] davi|16 years ago|reply
I think this comparison is unduly favorable to Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...
[+] [-] hga|16 years ago|reply
One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft Research (or whatever it's called) was how little gets out of the lab into the "real world", with things like F# being recent exceptions, and their funding of the GHC is another example of how they indirectly ship code. Although this mostly legit complaint is precisely your complaint about "not just research shops".
I'm pretty sure IBM is still doing some tech R&D, how much in the coding area I'm not sure, let alone for how long.
Hmmm, has such a beast other than Sun for a brief time ever existed? Obviously Bell Labs, and the UCB Unix project (and some other DARPA projects that had useful code as a required deliverable, e.g. their general VLSI infrastructure push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project). MIT's exokernel project found itself reified in the real world as Xen, through yet another university lab.
Plus today there are other business models, e.g. look at Clojure (admittedly a one man project for the first few years), the cost of doing a R&D project that ships real world code is fantastically lower than it used to be when e.g. XEROX PARC was doing most? of its work on bit slice (i.e. not too fast) 16 bit Altos with 1-4 banks of 64KB RAM.
I came to the conclusion in the early '80s that some of the differences in the granularity of traditional Lisp and Smalltalk objects (the latter are larger) is in part due to the machines these people did their work on. Lisp has always gone for a big flat address space, Smalltalk had bank switching to contend with an I think that encouraged larger objects (larger than a cons cell, atom, numeric immediate, etc.
The architecture of X has a lot more to do with GAO "most preferred customer" rules/law than anything else.
[+] [-] grrrr|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitdiddle|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|16 years ago|reply
Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7 Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.
[+] [-] rortian|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gphil|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prog|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strlen|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axod|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkramlich|16 years ago|reply
I hope you take much deserved time off then maybe end up at one of the newer brain trusts like Google.
[+] [-] benatkin|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacktang|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akadien|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zandorg|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitdiddle|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulbaumgart|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sketerpot|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmike|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grrrr|16 years ago|reply