Harmony update

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.

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 11:38 am and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

    • 29 Responses to “Harmony update”

    1. ozzie Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 11:53 am

      first comment!!!

    2. Joe Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 12:03 pm

      “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).”

      well, isn’t THAT exactly what the Harmony guys are doing? They chose to discontinue Kaffe/Classpath and instead start from the scratch again, hopefully with a lot of “lessons learned” in mind.

      i for one, i will lean back and enjoy the show. Harmony will beat the cr*p out of Mono :-))

    3. Marc Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 12:35 pm

      I vote for a weekly best-of-harmony-maillist blog. Can someone please setup this? Another option would be a guess-when-will-harmany-die webpage. Something like the guess-the-pope-death-date websites which were around some weeks ago. What cool things could be done by putting harmony development hours into something useful. Compared to harmany, creating the ApacheDS project is a stroke of a genius.

    4. His Holiness Benedictus XVI Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 2:19 pm

      Repent, sinners, and SMD! This Harmony thingie will die even before I do.

    5. anon1 Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 3:13 pm

      What a jerk you are. ASF people have already done more that you will ever do in your pathetic life.

    6. Ben Dover Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 3:29 pm

      Reading Gier’s own weblog is also pretty funny. He rambles on about a homo etoric adventure with Dalibor Topic where the two hiked and ate beef while musing over the prospect of an open source VM. I have to admit that reading it gave me a woodie. He should have entitled the entry “Romancing The Bone”

    7. Bitter Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 7:23 pm

      I like your idea, Marc, but does any Apache project *ever* die?
      OK, Avalon committed prolonged ritual suicide, but apart from that?

    8. Vic Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 9:33 pm

      I think Mono is for real:
      http://primates.ximian.com/~lluis/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=38
      and it multi compiles.

      .V

    9. Perplexed Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 10:03 pm

      What? No question from Honey yet?

    10. Berlin Brown Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 10:13 pm

      A couple of points. There are already many java projects already off the ground. There are many VMs already out there, JikesRVM, JamVM. Tomcat claims to have a java compiler, IBM/Eclipse have a couple of different compilers including Jikes and the Eclipse compiler. Sun is just asking for it. Sun has released the source for years, they have all the documentation in the world on the java constructs. The apache folks are just going to find a way to put everything to together. Java is not so revolutionary that only a few Sun witches and wizards know the secret to. We will see early versions of the Harmony project in a year, maybe less. I am waiting for the Java operating system.

      Death to GCC, that would be news.

    11. Corby Page Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 10:49 pm

      OK, so in review…

      Hani writes a funny blog, and a workflow engine that works reasonably well. He gets a stalker-groupie who goes by the handle ‘Clown Puncher.’

      Geir writes an appserver that doesn’t work. He gets $100 million from IBM.

      For those keeping score at home:

      Geir: 1
      Hani: 0

    12. Cameron Says:
      May 17th, 2005 at 11:11 pm

      Corby, that was pretty funny.

      Geir: 1 (assist goes to Corby)
      Hani: 0

      You should write a blog.

      Peace.

    13. Nick Fitzsimons Says:
      May 18th, 2005 at 6:09 am

      Not just Spanish: “I am translating the proposal to Turkish. Whom shall I sent this and in
      which format ?”

    14. diprey Says:
      May 18th, 2005 at 8:04 pm

      Only smart people post here! I cannot see any replies from the folks who couldn’t do some basic math.

      Are we gonna get an algebra question next time?

    15. Berlin Brown Says:
      May 18th, 2005 at 8:22 pm

      Throw in some complex numbers. My phsyics teacher once told me, if there aren’t complex numbers in your equation, it isn’t real math.

      I think there is a pun in there somewhere

    16. Golly Says:
      May 18th, 2005 at 9:41 pm

      oh man, your blog is the best ever! “Harmony update” and “Death to apache” were the funniest things i’ve read in a long time! (i’m not being sarcastic btw).

    17. Anonymous Says:
      May 19th, 2005 at 11:39 am

      man, your blog is like so friggn awesome, man! Dude, I so pissed myself reading your jboss stuff, and I’m not kidding. Do you have like an email or something so I can contact you offline (if you know what I mean:)???

    18. Honey Says:
      May 20th, 2005 at 4:16 am

      Whats the definitive way to test for various browsers in a perl script? I’d like to detect IE3/4, NS3/4, and ‘other’.

    19. Corby Page Says:
      May 20th, 2005 at 11:58 am

      Honey, I usually just click “help->about” and it tells me the browser version. I don’t know what PERL is, so you’re on your own there.

    20. Spiffster Says:
      May 20th, 2005 at 2:11 pm

      You are such a bastard! Why can’t you support this valuable effort. Just wait and see! With the power of Open Source, a few dozen super-coders will replicate what it took Sun several thousand man-years to build!

      I for one would like to volunteer my services to implement String.toString(). Where do I sign up?

    21. Andy Oliver Says:
      May 21st, 2005 at 12:23 am

      I called first dibs on the Strig.toString() method, and I’m sure my implementation is better that anything you could come up with—I use AOP that way I can cross-cut my concerns.

    22. Delia's Barmy Army Says:
      May 21st, 2005 at 7:19 am

      Presumably if Harmony is going to be written in Java some kind of JVM will be required to run it.
      I’ve been using one from a company called Sun for quite some time now and can thoroughly recommend it.

    23. Toy App Maker Says:
      May 21st, 2005 at 12:42 pm

      I don’t know which is worse. Delia’s false presumptions, the Harmony project itself, or Delia’s lame attempt at ironic humor.

      You can compile java byte code to native code, by the way–so the joke’s on you.

      That being said, I think time spent on Harmony is good insofar as that it will occupy these fuckwits thereby preventing any more lame ass JSRs like JSR-241.

    24. vardaman Says:
      May 27th, 2005 at 3:37 pm

      “Throw in some complex numbers. My phsyics teacher once told me, if there aren’t complex numbers in your equation, it isn’t real math.”

      Ah, Grasshopper, integers are complex numbers.

    25. Hani Loves Men Says:
      May 30th, 2005 at 7:19 pm

      Hello Hani sorry but i cant help but flame you……. maybe you should get back to writing a non bile blog as writing this blog will end up with someone feeding you your own bile.

      Just leave Harmony alone Apache has contributed more to the community than you ever will and you just detest that fact.

      You lost every sense of respect i had for all your million’s of LOC contributions.

    26. namekuseijin Says:
      June 12th, 2005 at 10:06 pm

      this blog is stupid. it seems like a patethic pissing contest between mono fanboys and Sun Java fanboys…

    27. someone Says:
      June 16th, 2005 at 1:05 pm

      what’s ur problem? if u don’ like it just leave it alone noone has called u in.. and i wonder where u got ur “funny” arabic name… i u think i can flame u for it then u have the right to flame harmony

    28. Anonymous Says:
      June 19th, 2005 at 9:02 pm

      [Miscs] Hierarchy of The Apache Software Foundation
      Hierarchy of the Apache Software Foundation

      * The Apache Software Foundation
      o Apache HTTP Server Project
      + Apache HTTP WebServer — downloads
      o Apache Jakarta Project
      + Jakarta Alexandria — downloads
      + Jakarta BCEL — downloads
      + Jakarta BSF — downloads
      + Jakarta Cactus — downloads
      + Jakarta Commons
      # Jakarta Commons Attributes — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons BeanUtils — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Betwixt — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Chain — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons CLI — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Codec — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Collections — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Configuration — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Daemon — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons DBCP — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons DbUtils — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Digester — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Discovery — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons EL — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons FileUpload — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons HttpClient — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons IO — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Jelly — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Jexl — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons JXPath — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Lang — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Latka — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Launcher — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Logging — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Math — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Modeler — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Net — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Pool — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Primitives — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Transaction — downloads
      # Jakarta Commons Validator — downloads
      + Jakarta ECS — downloads
      + Jakarta HiveMind — downloads
      + Jakarta JCS — downloads
      + Jakarta JMeter — downloads
      + Jakarta ORO — downloads
      + Apache POI — downloads
      + Jakarta Regexp — downloads
      + Jakarta Slide — downloads
      + Jakarta Taglibs — downloads
      + Jakarta Tapestry — downloads
      + Jakarta Turbine — downloads
      + Jakarta Velocity — downloads
      + Jakarta Watchdog (Obsolete)
      o Apache XML Project (Federation)
      + Apache Xalan Project (T.L.P.)
      # Apache XML Xalan-J — downloads
      # Apache XML Xalan-C — downloads
      + Apache Xerces Project (T.L.P.)
      # Apache XML Xerces-J — downloads
      # Apache XML Xerces-C — downloads
      # Apache XML Xerces-P — downloads
      + Apache XMLBeans Project (T.L.P.)
      # Apache XMLBeans — downloads
      + Apache XML Graphics Project (T.L.P.)
      # Apache Batik — downloads
      # Apache FOP — downloads
      + Apache XML Security — downloads
      + Apache Xindice — downloads
      + Apache XML-Commons — downloads
      + Apache Axkit — downloads
      o Apache Web Services Project
      + Apache Axis
      # Apache Axis (Java) — downloads
      # Apache Axis (C++) — downloads
      + Apache WS-FX — downloads
      # Apache WS-FX Addressing — downloads
      # Apache WS-FX Sandesha — downloads
      # Apache WS-FX WSS4J — downloads
      + Apache JaxMe — downloads
      + Apache jUDDI — downloads
      + Apache SOAP — downloads
      + Apache WSIF — downloads
      + Apache WSIL — downloads
      + Apache WSRP4J — downloads
      + Apache XML-RPC — downloads
      o Apache Ant Project
      + Apache Ant — downloads
      o Apache APR Project
      + Apache Portable Runtime — downloads
      o Apache Avalon Project (Disbanded)
      + Apache Avalon — downloads
      o Apache Cocoon Project
      + Apache Cocoon 1.x — downloads
      + Apache Cocoon 2.0 — downloads
      + Apache Cocoon 2.1 — downloads
      o Apache DB Project
      + Apache OJB — downloads
      + Apache Torque — downloads
      + Apache DB/COMMONS — downloads
      o Apache Directory Project
      + Apache Directory — downloads
      o Apache Excalibur Project
      + Apache Excalibur — downloads
      o Apache Forrest Project
      + Apache Forrest — downloads
      o Apache Geronimo Project
      + Apache Geronimo — downloads
      o Apache Gump Project
      + Apache Gump
      o Apache iBATIS Project
      + Apache iBATIS
      o Apache Incubator Project
      + Apache Apollo
      + Apache Agila
      + Apache AltRMI
      + Apache Axion
      + Apache Beehive
      + Apache Derby
      + Apache FtpServer
      + Apache Graffito
      + Apache Harmony
      + Apache Hermes
      + Apache httpd-CLI
      + Apache Jackrabbit
      + Apache JuiCE
      + Apache Muse
      + Apache Nutch
      + Apache WSRP4J
      o Apache James Project
      + Apache James — downloads
      o Apache Lenya Project
      + Apache Lenya — downloads
      o Apache Logging Services Project
      + Apache Log4cxx — downloads
      + Apache Log4j — downloads
      + Apache Log4net — downloads
      + Apache Log4php — downloads
      o Apache Lucene Project
      + Apache Lucene — downloads
      o Apache Maven Project
      + Apache Maven — downloads
      o Apache MyFaces Project
      + Apache MyFaces — downloads
      o Apache Perl Project
      + mod_perl — downloads
      o Apache Portals Project
      + Apache Jetspeed-1 — downloads
      + Apache Jetspeed-2 — downloads
      + Apache Pluto — downloads
      + Apache WSRP-4J
      o Apache SpamAssassin Project
      + Apache SpamAssassin — downloads
      o Apache Struts Project
      + Apache Struts — downloads
      o Apache TCL Project
      + mod_tcl — downloads
      + Apache Rivet — downloads
      + Websh — downloads
      o Apache Tomcat Project
      + Apache Tomcat 3.x — downloads
      + Apache Tomcat 4.x — downloads
      + Apache Tomcat 5.x — downloads

    29. David Says:
      August 8th, 2005 at 11:55 am

      I think Paul Graham needs to put his free time where his mouth is and publish his next book free. After all free books are of better quality than books by whoring authors trying to take advantage of my lazy ignorance. Oh and why under the O’Reily name? Just pdf that shit up and put it on his blog. Who needs costly publishers?

      His three points are not “new” either. His analogies are just flat out horrible if not wrong. Take a look at any “successful” open source project and if you dig deep enough you’ll eventually see the @sun.com, @ibm.com email addresses. Why is this important? Because opensource is more about controlling mind share than it is about some hippy dude/gal working for the good of mankind. Sun knows this, IBM is learning this, Microsoft sort of knew this when they made IE free. While IE is not open source it does show you the power of free software. If firefox is such a better browser why isn’t it number 1?

      Nobody works for free and lives very long. Life costs money to try to say people work for free because they enjoy it is simplistic.

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