Interesting. That was not my perception of Sun at all. “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. Java was a language developed for IoT/toasters, and then hard pivoted to a write once run anywhere weblet language (ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language that sounded like a skin condition, renamed to ride the crest of energy sun marketing money threw at things).
Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux.
Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM.
Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.
> “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign.
No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time.
Also, the number format is a standard, not only used by JS, and given that it was supposed to be a minimal scripting language it is hard to argue against the initial design choice of choosing one all-encompassing big standard, and not burden the language with a complete set. Since he criticism was on the initial design:
> ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language
I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all.
Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is.
For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.
Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux.
Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM.
Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.