Archive for May, 2005

Harmony update

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005

If anyone is bored and out for a seriously hilarious read, try browsing the harmony-devel mailing list. If anyone has ever suspected that this project was formed by a bunch of clueless asshats, then it’s time to lay those doubts to rest and confirm the cruel harsh reality.

Of course, I realise that whenever any such massive project kicks off, the usual quota of lemmings will hurl themselves at it, promising the world and then getting bored within a couple of days as they realise that enthusiasm, good will, and desperation do not produce much code by themselves.

However, reading the list kept reminding me time and time again of another collection of mailing lists that had very similar content. For those of you old enough to remember, this is exactly what all the mozilla mailing lists sounded like back in 1998 or so. Everyone applauded the project for being an absolute stroke of genius. Everyone wanted to contribute and stick their oar in. It took about five years of wasted time and effort before even the most retarded of retards decided it’s time to give up the ghost, and salvage what can be salvaged and start from scratch (again).

Of course, the difference in this case is that the apache people have shown us time and time again that giving up is not an option. No matter how stupid an idea they have, no matter how much hatred they generate, no matter how many people will despise them, there’s always a v2 around the corner to alienate a whole new set of people (yes, that’s your obligatory maven reference). Why oh why can’t these people’s day-job managers keep them too busy to keep harming the rest of us?

So what does this hilarious mailing list contain? Well, here are some highlights:

  • A pluggable bytecode verifier thread. Surprising suggestion from geir, who generally manages to sound like he’s merely living in an alternate reality in public, instead of plain old retarded. Even funnier is that this thread was kicked off by Andy Oliver (with a distinct lack of jboss mention in his sig, instead back to pimping his poi shite).
  • Various random losers sending in their bio’s and offering unspecified random help.
  • Request for cross-compiling support (?!?)
  • An offer to translate the wiki to Spanish.
  • A 20 message thread about support for non-java languages (because we all feel that THAT’s the real problem with J2SE.)
  • A 50 message thread about whether to write the JVM in Java.
  • A whole horde of suggestions for features which are not present in J2SE (probably as a way to stick it to that ‘walk before you can run’ crowd, from a project which has yet to twitch). Even funnier is that one of the project ‘owners’ will often chime in with ‘that’s a good idea!’ to avoid the risk of sounding intelligent by remaining silent.
  • A random apache guy who uses FBSD and is very bitter that his pathetic platform isn’t supported by Sun. Said loser also hates java and thinks it performs terribly (just the kind of enthusiasm and dedication you expect on a JVM team).

    I have to say, that I actually was surprised at how childish the discussion is. I’m sure the majority of morons will drop off within a few weeks, more disturbing however is that many of the ‘core’ names also seem to be morons without the slightest clue about what the J2SE in J2SE actually means. I for one will be very eager to spit in all the project members’ faces if they don’t end up getting a donation from IBM or BEA and thus becoming the abysmal failures we’ve all long known them to be.

    • Posted in Java | 29 Comments »