Greenspun unspun
I’m sure most people have now read the hilariously ignorant and childish ‘Java is like an SUV’ article by internet celebrity Phil, that senile old has-been who managed to get tossed out of his own company.
First, he seems to think that JSP’s are a separate entity from J2EE, a totally unrelated technology and in many ways is the ‘opposite’ of J2EE. Secondly, he then points out how incredibly retarded academia is by stating that seniors and graduate students can’t even understand JSP pages. I don’t know what these kids majored in, but even the stupidest of undergrads we get in #java can usually figure out how to write a jsp. In my company the interns we hire (all undergrads) simply wouldn’t be there if they couldn’t write a jsp, and do that rather well. Yes, even if they knew nothing about jsps specifically beforehand, and only had basic java knowledge. Maybe he should stop expecting music or history students to churn out enterprise apps after listening to him babble on for a couple of hours eh?
Somehow though, after proclaiming JSP’s to be the only thing worth using, he then goes to point out all the flaws with using pure JSPs, such as tons of code at the top of every page. What a genius. Might as well blame the sledgehammer when it fails to tighten the screws on your glasses for being a cumbersome ugly tool.
Phil seems to be nothing more than a somewhat articulate Slashdot monkey. He made a stab at being rich and famous, and promptly failed, so he stuck to attempting fame. I remember reading with much hilarity his posts a few years ago detailing why he got tossed out of Ars Digita. I thought at the time, what a tool, thinking that somehow the world should owe him something since he had good intentions.
I’m glad that he slithered back to the academia orifice he crawled out of. Lets just hope he stays there and keep those Slashdot imbeciles entertained, instead of inflicting more of his unique brand of idiocy on those out in the real world.
September 23rd, 2003 at 11:24 am
Sorry about that artictle I wrote….I was smoking crack that day. Java is cool!
September 23rd, 2003 at 11:52 am
So I guess we won’t be seeing JBoss integrated with AOLServer, then?
September 23rd, 2003 at 12:26 pm
ridiculous — has this Greenspun guy ever heard of a concept called “learning curve” ??? oh my…
September 23rd, 2003 at 3:02 pm
I believe that he is quite wealthy actually. There are a bunch of accounts of his companies troubles, Ars Digita, on the internet. Some blame the VCs, others take a more balanced view. Anyway, I read somewhere that he was able to get quite a nice (double digit millions?) figure in the end…
September 23rd, 2003 at 4:39 pm
I love Phils blogs. This is real Entertainment. Forget Letterman or Leno. I cant get the picture out of my head, where his students are still counting prepared statements questions marks. How cool is that?
September 23rd, 2003 at 8:56 pm
Way to go, Hani. Now, that’s somebody who really does deserve your bile this time. Fire away! :)
September 24th, 2003 at 3:10 am
Damn… I read Slashdot… does that put me in the “imbecile” category too?
September 24th, 2003 at 3:51 am
Considering he owns a plane and spends many months a year flying it, I’d say he got the rich part right as well and just likes teaching.
But if he does like teaching, shouldn’t he have told his students they were going at it the wrong way? Maybe he just needed a vehicle to validate his unfounded hatred of Java and secretly wanted them to fail.
Some teacher.
September 24th, 2003 at 9:23 am
This is the best java-related blog EVAR. I find myself agreeing throughout, and my pals are convinced you and I are the same person as we’ve made similar observations about jboss and some of the dimmer (but I guess well-intentioned) jakarta projects.
I occasionally look at slashdot, both for the masochistic delights and because the more ignorant comments give me a warm sense of well-being. I noticed they’ve slapped some stuff about “Prevayler” on the front page.
Now, I don’t know about you, but it never occured to me to write java applications that just kept all the business objects (I’ve been brainwashed into using terms like that, my mousepad has a red queen on it) in ram, and then basically dump ram to a big-ass xml file once in a while. For a split second, my left brain was saying “that’s brilliant!” and my right brain was saying “that’s idiotic!” and they were nanoseconds from fisticuffs.
Somehow the two halves of my brain hammered out a nonagression pact pending more information. I looked at the Prevayler documentation, which, incidentally, is a wiki. I can’t be sure, but I think having a wiki is the laziest, most halfassed way to “document” something you could possibly ask for. Second perhaps only to the occasional “all in one changelog/install instructions/about” text file distributed with some of the more obscure free/open source software kicking around out there. Regardless, a wiki says to me “nobody cares enough about this project to make proper documentation and to get any given answer to any question you have you need to figure out what StupidCapsConventionNode is most likely to tell you what you want.” But, I digress.
So I’m going through, and there’s lots of jabber about why it’s better, the theory, how it works, all that. I’m a “shut up and show me” type person, so I found their demo petstore webapp. I’m pounding on it thinking “yeah, this is pretty fast.” I’m nearly sold.
Then I go back to the intro. RAM is cheap, they say. Well, yeah, but it’s not that cheap. It’s not cheaper than disk. Even if it was that cheap, this machine I use for a development server can’t have more than a gig of ram, but it will happily access hundreds of gigs of IDE.
Then I realize I need more sleep, ’cause the fact that I considered this XMLEncoder with transactions house of cards crap for a second means I’m overtired. The same benefits the Prevayler serialization offers and more could be realized by putting a database on a ramdisk and splicing it off to a mirror db once in a while. With enough cache or buffers, db transactions shouldn’t cost that much more, and the vast majority of java apps are probably network or user-bound anyway so the expense of persisting objects to a rdbms really shouldn’t factor in. It reminded me more and more of the paperless office crap that was in vogue briefly: there were a few rigged demos and lots of hype, but the reality of it is nearly 20 years after all that noise, the average cubicle farm has massive amounts of desk real estate taken up by printers and paper, and networked printers all over the shop, and more and more of these combination printer/photocopier things in the copy room so instead of the arduous process of printing your 50 pages of mostly clipart powerpoint presentation to the laserjet on your desk and photocopying it you can now instruct the photocopier to make you 50 copies, hole-punched, stapled and collated. And, more than likely on the wrong paper the first time, and/or with the wrong orientation. With these printer/copier things came bigger recycling bins, the last time I went in the copy room it was like a giant blue plastic dumpster in the corner, and somebody, somewhere thinks this is “good?” or “progress?”
The bottom line is now I have Prevayler to add to a list of horrible disappointments including entity bean CMP, JDO, torque, castor, and probably a few others (Hibernate is now the ORM rope I prefer to hang myself with).
Also, thanks for raging against the Blochs and Fleurys.
September 24th, 2003 at 2:47 pm
Er… nice one Jake. Brevity is the soul of
September 26th, 2003 at 9:47 am
You deserve lapidation Hani, Greenspun is my hero: he managed to get rich (the VCs paid him big bucks for shutting up when aD sunk) by creating a company based on a big mess of spaghetti code (the infamous Arsdigita Community System) and getting MIT nerds into believing that they were going to make the next SAP.
A total genious, this guy. You sholud pay him some respect.