BlarfWobble's comments

BlarfWobble | 12 years ago | on: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

It wasn't a parable about older family members being clueless when it comes to tech. People really can't imagine how a "new computer system" can cost 3 years and $90m to build, and are genuinely outraged, because it is so far removed from what they expect to be a normal or fair amount for a piece of software.

You pay a dollar for an app, $40 for a Sims game, maybe a few hundred for an OS and office suite, maybe $1500 for a fancy laptop. Sure you can imagine a 'website' might cost a few thousand, but _tens_of_millions_ ?? Surely, that is a disgraceful waste, right there.

BlarfWobble | 12 years ago | on: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

The short answer is that it's not just a website. The website is just the front of a large, complex project that involves many other things.

I have noticed how shocked people are when they hear how much custom software really costs. I don't know what you do for a living, but here's an example:

A family member hears you make software, ask you if you can create a website for his business for a friendly fee. Sure, you think. After reviewing his requirements, and deducting 50% because he's your uncle and you like him and want his business to do well, you give him a quote: 3 months and $10,000. He nearly gets a heart attack. What had he expected then? Well, a copy of windows costs less than $100. How could it be more than that?

BlarfWobble | 12 years ago | on: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

I'm shocked that people seem to think 3 years and $634m is a lot for a project of this scale.

Are you all offering to design and build it 6 months in PHP for $50k ?

BlarfWobble | 12 years ago | on: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

I didn't mention the word Oracle. Kaffe is still a JVM! It runs java applications unchanged.

Dalvik is not. It can't run java classes compiled with a regular java compiler

BlarfWobble | 12 years ago | on: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

Android doesn't really count as java, as it doesn't use the JVM.

But even if you do choose to count it, it's only a very small part of the java ecosystem. Applets are dead, and java desktop applications unpopular, but without you necessarily seeing it, enormous amounts of server side software are made with java. If it hadn't been Java, it would have been some other language, but the fact is that there is such an enormous ecosystem of high quality libraries, tools, infrastructure and experienced programmers, architects and devops built around Java and the JVM that I don't see anything toppling it from the #1 position any time soon.

C#, being a better designed and more rapidly evolved language, might have displaced it if Windows rather than Linux had become more popular as a server OS, but it didn't, and now it won't, so that is moot.