The “Java” prefix still confuses new users, not to mention "bizdev" people, and probably leads to legal issues beyond just the trademark. "JavaScript" has always sucked as a name, we're just used to it now. Why are we fighting so hard for it? Let's just take this as an opportunity to name it something that actually makes sense. It will maybe be sort of annoying for a few years, but I'm certain one day we'll look back and not believe we used to call it "JAVA Script".
Early in my career, in the early 2000's I was tasked with modernizing a massive site that had many <script type="application/livescript"> tags throughout. I still don't fully understand, wasn't really still the public under this name at some point?
“Your CV says that you use JavaScript/WebScript. Which one would you say you used most often?”
But WebScript I could actually get behind! (if the case fails)
But this is especially so given that JavaScript isn't even a good name. It would be one thing to fight this on principle if the name was great, but it isn't. In fact, the name was specifically originally chosen due to its confusion-causing powers -- the unfortunate reality is that JavaScript was chosen precisely to ride the coattails of the then hot new technology Java. This was a horrible idea from day one. No one would suggest I name a new unrelated programming language "SwiftScript" or "RustScript" today to benefit from the popularity of those languages. It would be both tacky and shortsighted. Is it tacky enough to change in isolation? No, it would just be yet another unfortunate part of tech culture, like "referer" only having 3 r's instead of 4. But it absolutely is tacky enough to give up if we are facing some huge case against an actor that is quite literally infamous for their stubbornness in court. No one at Oracle is thinking about this for longer than 5 minutes, while it is causing tremendous grief to Ryan and half the JavaScript community. Why give them that? Let Oracle own all the shitty Java-related trademarks. We're not even handing them a win. The JS trademark will become worthless once we all switch to WebScript, and as an added bonus it won't even accidentally provide even a tiny bit of free marketing for any other their technologies like JavaScript maybe does today. Their reward can be a step further toward of obscurity, self-excising themselves from their current unearned appearance in the history of the web whenever JavaScript is mentioned.
According to Bryan Cantrill, you don't need to be open minded about Oracle. It's a waste of the openness of your mind. He says what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. He believes there has been no entity in human history with less complexity and nuance to it than Oracle.
Bryan warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
The fact that there are so many people motivated to code alternatives to Oracle products says a lot about Oracle's business practices.
Then stuff like distributed transactions, raw disk access for databases, among other niceties that people reaching to Postgres or MySQL probably never heard of, but many Fortune 500 enjoy, even if one for checking bullet points on RFPs.
Postgres comes second, after getting all puzzle pieces together, some of them also commercial.
> simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:
~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
821
Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.
Not quite sure this is doing them damage.
Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.
Interpretation on the fact and metric and the need to tell I leave up to you
My favorite other example of this is when I see a UI redesign that didn't actually benefit anyone and was more a style change than anything, and sometimes actively makes usability worse (cough Liquid Glass cough) In those situations I always think "well, some designers on staff needed to justify their paychecks".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...
Because it provides zero value and costs something to keep.
Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."
I’d be surprised if Oracle released the trademark without a fight to the end. They have a special way of decimating open source projects.
Had it not been for Oracle, Java would have died on version 6, and it remains to be seen what would have happened from anything else.
Both Java the language and OpenJDK the main runtime & development kit have had much more money and manpower poured into them under Oracle than they ever had previously. Both continue to advance rapidly after almost dying pre-Oracle acquisition.
MySQL 8 (released in 2018) was a massive release that brought many long awaited features (like CTEs) to the database, although MySQL's development have stalled during the past few years.
Oracle employs several Linux kernel developers and is one of major contributors (especially to XFS and btrfs): https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414
Not top 3 or even top 10, but better than most companies out there.
That's all I can remember.
edit: after thinking about it for a couple more minutes, they're also the main developer of GraalVM — the only high quality FOSS AOT compiler for Java (also mentioned by a sibling comment), and are writing one of the major relatively lightweight modern alternatives to Spring (the other two being Micronaut and Quarkus): https://helidon.io
Oracle is a parasite.
I guess I don't feel bad not knowing this though, as the language really does have nothing to do with the company it's insane that they even hold a trademark for it.
To google something has for decades for millenials meant search online in any way.
Trademark law is dumb and inconvenient. Only people owning trademarks disagree.
But so are many other laws. We all just have to follow them all anyway.
I find that convenient, despite owning no trademarks.
You're probably thinking of Genericisation. This isn't a law in the sense you probably mean, there is no statute about it, no legislature wrote it, nobody signed anything. Instead Genericisation is a legal doctrine related to the core idea in trademark law that we can't have exclusive use of descriptive marks.
Suppose you make a Big Car and you try to trademark "Big Car" as your exclusive mark for this new product. That's just describing the car, it's generic so you can't do that, it's OK to trademark "Giganticar" or "Waterluvian Car" or something because people can describe what their similar product is with the words "big car" but if you were allowed to own "Big Car" they can't do that.
Genericisation says well, if your product is so successful that now everybody knows what a "Waterluvian" is, and most people shown a new big car from say, Ford, say "Waterluvian" so that even Ford's sales people struggle to teach the guys on the forecourt not to call this a "Waterluvian" - that's now a generic term, you can't stop Ford just saying they're making a Waterluvian.
Genericisation only applies for crazy famous stuff. Kleenex is an example because your mom knows what a kleenex is, the guy who mows your lawn knows, Elon Musk knows, everybody knows, that's actually famous. Javascript probably wouldn't meet that requirement. My mother does not know what Javascript is, my boss does, because he's a software engineer, and maybe the average numerate graduate knows, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
Dilution is a related idea, also for very famous things. Dilution says for these famous things it's not OK to use the famous mark for any other purpose even though it's not related. So Disney toilet paper isn't OK, Coca-Cola brand vibrators, not OK, and so on. Nobody thinks the vibrator is a beverage, but Coke is so famous that doesn't matter. That doesn't impact here either.
TypeScript is now called DecafScript.
Why we do not just use EcmaScript from now on in conversations and as a trend so the issue is solved. A joke to me.
As for master->main, that was just fake activism by people desperately wanting to be a part of something but not prepared to put in any actual work to convince anyone of anything they don't already agree with. Convincing people to drop the name JavaScript would be difficult due to the attachment and perceived loss to an evil company.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-review-on-pr...
I'd donate.
Python was invented earlier, but didn’t see wide use until later.
And that they were both massively accelerated by the level of interest in the early WWW is undeniable. No other general purpose languages can say that except perhaps Perl, and it slowly burned out.
Is that really true though? As I understood it JavaScript was mainly adopted because Java was popular at the time. JavaScript originally shipped as LiveScript, and they changed it to JavaScript later. Here is a nice quote on it from Brendan Eich:
“The name JavaScript was chosen when Java was hot, and we were doing LiveConnect to hook up JS to Java applets.”
Here is one from David Flanagan:
“JavaScript was originally developed under the name Mocha… It was renamed JavaScript in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun Microsystems.”
So the JVM has a runtime-enforced nominal type system (and object model) with classes.
But JS, to my knowledge, only has primitive types enforced at runtime, and no nomimal class system, unless you basically implement it yourself?
Uh, edit: maybe I get you now, it does have that in a way. But prototype identity and "instanceof" are rarely used in practise.
Maybe I'm missing your point here. Answering at late local time.
It would be so great to have a nominal type system in the browser though.
So many JS librarlies have their own version of it, and it causes insufferable headaches when combined with TypeScript.
Like, they use complicated hacks to make sure that their library objects are not structurall/duck typed.
Yes, the typing and semantic models are wildly different. The point is that they’re primitive in a way that the other widespread alternative, C++, did not inherit from its Cfront heritage.