Dear Mr. Gruber…
Dear Mr. Gruber,
As regards this post and this: F#%k you too. Now your blog alternates between the well put and the irritating borderline fanboy (and sometimes within the same post). That is your right, it’s your blog. This is my blog and as such I can say just how much I wish that you would think think though before you post something.
In the first of those two posts, you point to a post of James Gosling and mock the fact that he has switched to an OS that doesn’t suspend well. Well think about, here is a guy who wanted to use OS X. He had praised the OS. And then because Apple made a (in my opinion) boneheaded move that an OS that wouldn’t suspend properly was better than OS X for him.
In the second post you make the claim “No important software for the Mac depends on Java.” I would like to inform you of a little secret: the only important software to a user is the software they want to use or they need to use. Everything else is irrelevant to that user.
I don’t want to get in a numbers or a research game, but I would like to point to LightZone as an example of an awesome and amazing piece of software that happens to be written in Java. It is great on the Mac. For the photographers that use it, it is mission critical, and it would benefit greatly from Java 6.
Now what irks me isn’t just how late Apple is with Java 6 in Leopard. It is how late they are in general. Java 6 was released for Windows, Linux, and Solaris on Dec 7, 2006. Now Apple does they own port so I would expect it to be a few months late. I did not expect to wait the better part of a year for it to be released. And Apple continues to its stupid policy of waiting for the next version of OS X to release the next version of Java.
Now in your post you say “But it’s not like Apple is sitting on a top-notch Java-6-for-Mac-OS-X and withholding it out of spite. They simply decided to allocate engineering resources elsewhere. In the case of Java, I don’t think it was even a close call. What should they have done? Delayed Leopard even further?” Let us talk about Apple’s resource issues. Apple delayed Leopard for the iPhone. Apple delayed Java to release Leopard.
Apple is a very big company. They make a lot of money. They are profitable. So why in the name of dog do they appear to be so short staffed that they have to rob Peter to pay Paul (oh and we know how well throwing bodies at a problem helps the development process)? If Apple is truly this resource constrained, we actually should be worried.
Apple made a huge effort to court Java developers. They made the best environment to develop programs in Java. They made the best Java implementation of Java I have worked with. OS X (as you know) is a great OS to develop on. So when I am mad at Apple for delaying Java 6, it is because I feel like a woman who realized that her boyfriend felt he didn’t have to be romantic now that I have slept with him.
One last thing is worth pointing out (and my god is this epic in size for a tumble). Take a look James Gosling’s continuation of the post you pointed to where he says “Lots of folks ask ‘why doesn’t sun just do the JDK for Mac?’. The real answer is ‘because Apple wanted to do it”. They’ve wanted to do all sorts of customization and integration that only they could do - because they own the OS.’
Apple does their own Java implementation because they want it to be up to their standards. That is fine. That is a big part why the MacBook I am typing on is my primary system (for the record I am biplatform). I just with that Apple would live up to they commitment, or just actually TALK TO US and let us know where things stand.
