James Gosling Appointed to the Order of Canada 191
Andrija Ifkovic writes "James Gosling, the creator of Java language and a VP of Sun has been appointed to the Order of Canada. 'The Order of Canada recognizes outstanding lifetime achievement and contributions to society and the country by Canadians from all walks of life.' This is the highest honor Canada can bestow upon its citizens."
Why Gosling? (Score:5, Funny)
Why is James Gosling is receiving the OoC?
I was just looking through the Java source and it says "// Author: Joyce Hatto"
My Order of Canada includes Don Cherry! (Score:2)
Course he'll still need that 7 second delay.
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Highest Honor (Score:5, Funny)
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Couldn't give the OoC to a better person (Score:2, Funny)
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I wouldn't put is as strongly as "blame", but I think Java is only a mediocre programming language. It sure did a lot of good for the world, but it also continues to hold back certain advancements, not to mention soak up a lot of time and energy (in development, research, press coverage, discussions) that could (IMO) be spent better elsewhere.
If we're going to hand out awards for people for having worked on programming languages, I would rather suggest Guy Steele [wikipedia.org], who has contributed
Re:Couldn't give the OoC to a better person (Score:4, Interesting)
There are several Canadians who have also developed programming languages of greater significance the Java, which is a derivative of C/C++ so not completely original.
Ken Iverson, who created the APL language, was a Canadian. He was giving the ACM Turing award for this, but never received the Order of Canada.
Tim Bray, one of the main developers of XML, is also a Canadian.
Rob Pike, developer of Plan9 and Inferno, and creator of many Unix utilities, is also Canadian
Brian Kernighan, co=developer of AWK and co-author of "The C Programming Language" book is also Canadian.
There are even more.Politicians (Score:2)
So: to be noticed by Canadian politicians, a software development figure would need to be a) rich, b) famous,
Yeah, yeah, we see you up there... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, yeah, we see you up there... (Score:5, Funny)
It's not even a real VM anyway.
Re:Yeah, yeah, we see you up there... (Score:5, Funny)
Congrats (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Congrats (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't you first strip Mick Jagger of his knighthood and then we'll talk about taking things seriously.
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Or giving Louis L'Amour the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Are you kidding? Mick deserves his knighthood more than most, I mean the guy is what... 63 years old and he still gets more action than the entire slashdot membership combined.
In my opinion, the big question is why we don't have 'Sir Ozzy Osbourne' yet! The guy is a national treasure.
Re:Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because comedy can't possibly contribute anything to a culture, ya hoser.
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Not really... (Score:3, Interesting)
Case in point: I don't think anyone would question the talents of Peter Sellers, yet Inspector Clueso is far more of a buffoon then either of the two.
Bob & Doug *not* members of Order of Canada (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an independent confirmation [canadianshakespeares.ca]: Although it has been written in various places that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas received the Order of Canada for their contribution to Canadian culture, a phone call to Rideau Hall revealed that they were not members of the Order of Canada.
Comedy (Score:2)
Blame Canada! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Blame Canada! (Score:5, Funny)
Dangling prepositions. That's all you.
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Copied Winston Churchill perhaps Yoda did.
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He'll always be the Gosling Emacs guy to me. grrr (Score:2)
Re:He'll always be the Gosling Emacs guy to me. gr (Score:2)
You mean Linus?
Larry McVoy (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper [wikipedia.org]
The common thread I was alluding to was the attempt by these parties to take something from the "public domain" and restrict it for commercial purposes.
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Yeah I know the story. I stopped investigating bitkeeper in my work environment because of the way BitMover was behaving towards their "customers"
Freedom Medal (Score:5, Insightful)
Whores? (Score:2)
Yep, I've been watching too much Firefly.
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Sir James Gosling? (Score:2)
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Legally, yes, but the Queen (in right of Canada) doesn't do that anymore unless the CANADIAN government allows it. It's been against government policy since the 40s.
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But this happened before I knew what politics were, so I'm probably at least a little wrong...
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Gosling will be able to use the letters OC, CC or CM after his name however.
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Subjects (Score:2)
And Americans probably dig the British Monarchy quite a bit more than Canadians do. One of the benefits of a couple of a divorce is that you can go back for a quick fling, and it's all good. Time and distance heal all wounds. But when you're still in the separation period, that kind of thing just doesn't fly.
For Java? (Score:4, Funny)
As someone who spent the better part of a day trying to get Eclipse, Swing, Tomcat, and the JDK set up, I think he should have had the medal pinned to his scrotum.
Re:For Java? (Score:5, Informative)
Swing doesn't take any "setting up", it's a core API.
Tomcat runs pretty-much out of the box, although porting web-apps to it from other servlet containers can be problematic (especially if you foolishly use container-specific extensions).
Eclipse can be troublesome in that the website doesn't make it entirely clear what it is you should be downloading. As long as you get it right, however (and it's not really that hard, certainly much easier than it used to be) then you just extract it and double-click the executable to run it.
Now I'll grant that perhaps you might have trouble integrating Eclipse and Tomcat (as I've never tried it I can't comment), and you'd certainly have trouble trying to use Swing in a web-app, but without more detail I really can't see where on Earth you could be going wrong.
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I made a mistake, it wasn't "Swing" it was "Spring." The homonyms got crossed in my brain.
And I'm still pulling out my hair trying to get a project from our CVS repository to run in Tomcat through Eclipse.
Re:For Java? (Score:4, Informative)
Bull. Swing implements its own 100% Java widget toolkit with various custom "look and feel" hooks. It cares not-a-bit what GTK+ theme you are using. It doesn't even know what GTK+ is.
> As for Eclipse, you can tell it's intended to be a Windows app, because it tries to write to its install directory.
Poppycock. I have Eclipse 3.2 installed into
Eclipse writes everything to a workspace, which the user chooses on startup and can exist anywhere on the file system. The default is ~/workspace, but this can be changed by the user to whatever is more desired.
You can even install new plug-ins and features in your home area and tie them into your workspace, so each user can have their own custom features without sudo'ing up and adding them into the base install.
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Ever notice how Eclipse asks you which workspace you want to use when it starts up? (And that you can tell it to use one by default?) Ever wonder where it stores the information? It's a directory called "configuration" under the Eclipse install. Go ahead, go look for it.
Yes, information is cached there in a single-user scenario, when the user has write access to the install location. However (from the Eclipse help)...
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As Dr. Evil said, "There's nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking I suggest you try it."
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As for the JDK, sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk should cover it.
Canada Gosling. (Score:2)
Personally, I'm just glad that this helps to clarify the species.
Java was, apparently, invented by an immature Canada Goose, as opposed the the Greylag variety that we see more of around here..
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Environment Canada just released the results of a study that show that the Canada Goose does NOT, in fact, migrate south in the winter and back north in the summer.
Seems they're just following the old folks that feed them
So (Score:2)
Canada also seems to have a problem with chasing beavers [youtube.com].
Design pattern (Score:5, Funny)
Officer OC is *not* highest award (Score:2)
- Member of the Order of Canada
- Officer of the Order of Canada
- Companion of the Order of Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Canada [wikipedia.org]Great (Score:3, Funny)
Yep, him and my Dad (Score:3, Informative)
Most people who have had hip replacements have benefited from my Dad's work. Including Dad himself.
We're so proud!
Blame Canada! (Score:2)
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For making Java, he should have been deported, though.
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Still, Brian Kernighan (yeah, some guy who had hardly any effect on the world of programming languages
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Pamela Anderson too (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pamela Anderson too (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
That would explain "Dubya" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That would explain "Dubya" (Score:4, Insightful)
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everywhere has trainwrecks of that magnitude. The difference for Texas is that we have so many hot women, our trainwrecks have a shot at appearing in Playboy.
Remember also that nobody heard of her before Hefner (a Californian, or Chicagoan if you want to go by birth place) decided to make her famous. If that had not happened she would have been just another batshit insane stripper in houston that nobody knew existed.
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Well, there was Jim Carrey. And Keanu Reeves.
But that was just on a dare. We didn't think anyone would take that seriously.
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Yeah the song is called 'Ironic' and it isn't actually ironic. It's kind of ironic isn't it. Oh yeah, you wouldn't get it :-P
Re:An award (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Poor programmers don't know how to optimize their code to run well
3. Java makes it easy for even poor programmers to do their job
Take these three statements and you have your truth on Java. Any single piece of code can be made to grind your system to a halt. Its nothing special to Java, but since the only client-side Java apps you've been exposed to are apparently ass, then you'll never know.
What Java and any other modern high level language allows for are people who aren't necessarily the best programmers to still do their jobs. Do I see you wanting to go out and build business apps, or are you more likely to make super-cool widget X? Since you're choosing to do the more interesting widget, someone's left to build that business app. If all there were only 'good' programmers in our industry, only a very very few things would ever be done. Since we don't live in that world, we have to make less optimal programmers as effective as possible.
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What bollox. It's trivial to write a program that will never complete its execution. Also a well written piece of C code WILL run faster than a well written piece of Java code. Java's easier to maintain in the long run though I'll grant you.
2. Poor programmers don't know how to optimize their code to run well
True enough. Poor programmers don't know how. Good one's are rarely given the time to do it. It's usually not cost effective to optimise most code.
3. Java makes
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I have: (Paraphrased from the original Informix 4GL)
For i = 1 to 8
Case i
When 1
Location1 = 0
When 2
Location2 = 0
When 3
Location3 = 0
When 4
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My favorite Java incident was when the lead manager of the Java admin part of a rather complex embedded system I was the lead engineer on (but told to use Java for our admin interface) said "testing filed a memory leak against my code, it can't be, Java is garbage collected."
Yes, but in some GUI history object holding a reference to some 4MB "temporary" working data structure x 100 past history entries is a memory leak (especially in 1997). The constant excuse that garbage collection e
Re:Canada? yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
The thing is, most of us don't see that as a bad thing, whereas you US folks have this pre-conditioned distrust of Royalty for some unfathomable reason - probably something to do with that whole "Tea" issue in Boston way back when. I admit it, the King made a mistake back then OK?. If you would just get over that though, I am sure we could let you back into the Commonwealth
Re:Canada? yeah right or is it UK? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but unlike the US, Canada has equal rights for women, permits gay marriages, and solved the whole abortion debate decades ago.
Plus, they have Nelly Furtado. Think about it
And, at one point, I happened to be away from my Army unit on back-to-back training courses when the Queen visited - and so was the only member of my unit not to have a medal from that visit. Dang.
Re:Canada? yeah right (Score:4, Informative)
In day to day practise yes, but in truth the Governor General and in turn the Queen do have some very important political power. The powers that the GG (and the Queen) hold are part of the checks and balances of government in Canada preventing an "unscrupulous Prime Minister" from doing too much harm.
The GG (as the representative of the head of state) and the head of state (currently the Queen, but will be a King) are the only ones allowed to dissolve parliament and call an election. The Prime Minister is not allowed. The GG also gives Royal Ascent to new laws. By tradition the GG will dissolve parliament and pass Royal Ascent when the Prime Minister asks so that a new federal election can be called and new laws can come into effect. Theoretically the Queen (by way of the GG in Canada and other commonwealth nations) can dissolve parliament at any time and can withhold Royal Ascent. But like in England, if this happened there would be a political firestorm kicked up. This happened once in Canada in 1926 when the GG did not dissolve a minority government as requested by the Prime Minister. In Australia where the GG has the same role, their GG dissolved the government in 1975 due to a crisis in government. In both cases this kicked up a lot of debate on the role of the GG.
Only the Queen (or King) can appoint a GG, but by tradition appoints someone suggested by the PM.
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Is that where she climbs all over the bill in question? Or possibly mounts Parliament Hill? Or did you perhaps mean "Royal Assent"?
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Argh! Yes.
The Queen tried it in Fiji in 86 and failed (Score:3, Interesting)
So those constitutional checks
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Yes, but that is always true. If you live in any democratically elected republic, dominion, constitutional monarchy, whatever, and the military decides to overthrow the government (and has the ability to do so), then the checks and balances will go out the window. I said the military, but if there were a popular uprising, it could happen as well. So I think I would make an addition to your caveat: "So those constitutional checks are only effective if backed by sufficient force"... 'and that force agrees
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The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance, then established the fiction that they were fundamentally superior by the grace of genetics and edict of God, and used that fiction to claim right to subjugate and torture their "subjects" when not embroiling them in se
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There's no doubt in my mind that the monarchical system developed through some sorta odd psychological need. While it's true that a lot of uglyness has occurred in maintaining monarchies over the centuries, it's not like democracy doesn't take us in a semi-similar direction.
As it has been said before, 8 years of President Hillary Clinton would make for 28 straight years
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The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance, then established the fiction that they were fundamentally superior by the grace of genetics and edict of God, and used that fiction to claim right to subjugate and torture their "subjects" when not embroiling them in self-enriching wars.
I wholeheartedly agree! Off with their heads! That's what's so great about the land of the brave: Americans don't have royalty, the same way they don't have an Empire.
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What compelled you to post? Did you actually disagree with me, or was it just unacce
Ironic compulsion (Score:2)
Even if a lot of power is concentrated into a few hands doesn't make royalty. It's not hereditary, institutionalized, or concomitant with any claim of inherent superiority. Likewise if you want to argue that the USA is an empire, then please do so within the confines of the actual definition of the term.
It's true that 'empire' is a deprecated term, in the dustbin of history for now. So what has replaced it? How does one describe a state that has over 700 military bases in over 100 nations, and a corresponding international web of commerce and espionage? That considers the other side of the globe its own backyard? The term begs redefinition, because while the label 'empire' has gone away with the power of the royals, the urge to make one sure hasn't. American patriotism strives to overlook the implication
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call me crazy, but as an atheist and devout (small-r) republican, i find the idea that someone is worthy of being my head of state by dint of their lineage, and ultimately because of divine right, to be not just preposterous, but offensive.
i know it doesn't make much practical difference. i lived in england for a couple of years, and i never had to make any profession of fealty or bow to royalty in any way. bu
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Someone has to be head of state. Personally, I think it's best if that figure has little real political power, since they will attract a lot of misplaced emotional projection. There are Americans who think, for example, that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president. Citizens should be critical of those who wield power. Let them feel that it's unpatriotic to criticize the king, and feel free to throw tomatoes or garlands at their elected officials as deserved.
The founding fathers of the US should ha
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technically, it's the house of representatives that accepts the vote of the electoral college and resolves disputes, ties (like jefferson v. burr in 1800), etc. there's a melodramatic bit in fahrenheit 9/11 where numerous reps try to challenge the certification of the 2000 election, but fail on procedural grounds because no senator would join in the challenge.
now, the bush v. gore ruling was a travesty of justice, and i think it will be remembered as a low point of the modern court. but they didn't act
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Could it be because royalty is just hereditary dictatorship in fancy clothes? In your case it's hereditary dictatorship that doesn't do anything useful. And it's not just US folks either. In some countries, like France and Russia, they went and killed all their royalty. I like that idea!
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There is NO compelling or practical reason to dump the queen as a symbolic head of state. And no, being disrespected by someone on the internets is no reason to throw your entire country's history away.
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I have often wondered about this. When Liz finally carks it, Chuck will be the next King of England because of an algorithm coded in UK law. Thats the one which says something like oldest to youngest male child, then oldest to youngest female, or whatever.
But here in Australia do we have a parallel law? Or do we inherit british law. I know that we inherited basic laws about theft, etc. But that was like taking
Re:Canada? yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)