So I'll stick my neck out and declare myself fairly sanguine about an IBM absorption of Sun. If the acquisition founders, my money's on it being the decision of Sun. Not the decision IBM and most certainly not the result any antitrust paranoia.Honestly, I've never really paid that much attention to Oracle, simply because they had a reputation of being too proprietary, too overkill and waaaay too spendy when I was pressed for time and harder pressed for money as a student. By the time I was making any database software decisions, there were too many other viable alternatives. So I had some catch-up reading to do tonight. By buying Sun, Oracle also acquires MySQL. So learning that Oracle purchased the commercial arm of InnoDB a few years back sort of raised my hackles. In that space, that's tantamount to owning Park Place and then snapping up Boardwalk. And I am not looking forward to learning the quirks of PostgreSQL as LAMP servers become LAPP servers.
My first concern is, of course, for the Java programming language. But despite this morning's initial "Say WHAT?!?!?! Huminahuminahuminahumina..." freak-out at the news, tonight's gut feeling is that Oracle won't be able to monetize Java any better than Sun did. Which is to say that it will effectively be a loss-leader. Thus, they don't have an incentive to pimp it. But, from the sound of it, they're also heavily dependent on the Java language, so killing it off isn't an option. Unless, of course, they invent something more effective. And--let's be real here--Oracle is about databases, not languages--unless you're talking about dialects of SQL.
Why freak out about Java's fate? After all, Sun open sourced the code, which means that Oracle will have Hades' own time slamming the lid shut again. What I'm actually worried about is the documentation. Not as a hangover from my tech. writer days, mind you. Understand that the documentation from Sun and JGuru actually made that language easy to learn. The API documents were organized in a concise but useful format, and tutorials abounded. Contrast that to the months I spent slogging through Visual Basic 4 and 5 and C++. In those days, I was actually surprised when I could find exactly what I was looking for in Microsoft's so-called "Help." And tutorials? Please. You're supposed to go to school or buy a lot of books if you want to know how to actually do anything with the APIs. (Silly programmer!)
Additionally, Sun gives Java developers the heads-up that a function will go by the wayside a few releases before retiring it. Contrast that to Microsoft's capricious transition from 1.0 to 2.0 in .NET, breaking not-so-very-legacy code without so much as a by-your-leave. A trick that Adobe Flex likewise pulled on me between 2.0 and 3.0.
Those two aspects, more than any single language feature--saving perhaps garbage collection--is what made me a convert to Java. (Of course, having had a few semesters of C/C++ made it so much easier--not a small consideration, by any means!) That's the part I worry about Larry and the gang dorking up.
