Sun's Trading Symbol Going From SUNW To JAVA 356
Mortimer.CA writes "Straight from Jonathan Schwartz's weblog, Sun is changing their ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA: 'JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that's inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). [...] To be very clear, this isn't about changing the company name or focus — we are Sun, we are a systems company, and we will always be a derivative of the students that created us, Stanford University Network is here to stay. But we are no longer simply a workstation company, nor a company whose products can be limited by one category — and Java does a better job of capturing exactly that sentiment than any other four letter symbol.'"
Re:Uhm. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:in another news... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The horse is dead, quit beating it. (Score:3, Informative)
The most popular programming language [tiobe.com] on the planet is doomed?
You mean, the Java programs I write that run on Linux, BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Windows, and AS/400 aren't actually working? You should have told me sooner! Maybe you can tell me how, exactly, they're not working, because they seem to be working fine!
Because we hear about buffer overflow exploits in Java programs leaving your machine vulnerable all the time? Oh, wait. We almost never hear about those.
That's funny, it freed me from the Win32 API, and dozens upon dozens upon dozens of other developers I know.
Yeah, right. We'll look back and see how badly Java failed, because it only retained the #1 crown for a few decades (or more).
You need a reality check.
Re:Uhm. (Score:3, Informative)
Sun (the company) = Sun Microsystems.
Re:The full quote regarding Sun's symbol change (Score:3, Informative)
Java is not dead or dying, regardless what many on /. like to say. There are basically two primary platforms now for custom in-house business development: Java and .NET.
Businesses that are predominately Windows based (desktops, servers, SQL Server, etc) find the holistic approach of .NET and the Visual Studio tool suite (which is a decent development environment) to be the best model for them. Businesses that are more heterogeneous tend to use Java more. You are likely to find very few businesses trusting application development to Python, Ruby, TCL or the next big thing. You might see use of PHP for web front ends, though DHTML/AJAX front ends are becoming very common, but usually business logic is either in Java or .NET.
It seems the folks on /. have a problem with Java for the very reason that it is accepted by businesses. There is a strong anti-business, anti-management sentiment here, to the point that anything actually liked by business (i.e. PHBs) must by definition be bad.
Java is a designed environment, has recommended approaches to use, has corporate support from tools vendors. In other words, it isn't intended to be a quick and dirty tool, it is intended for serious, business critical software development. As others have pointed out, it actually does run on multiple operating systems as advertised.
It must be the hacker (in the original sense) mentality that permeates /. and makes folks favor scripting languages like Ruby and Python over Java. It is possible one of these other languages/platforms will overtake Java's position in business, if they get solid base libraries and tool vendor backing, but until then Java is not dead.
Re:I can't really pass judgement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not sure if this is a good idea (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not sure if this is a good idea (Score:3, Informative)