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| Authored by: DieterWasDriving on Thursday, May 24 2012 @ 05:51 PM EDT |
The "Write Once, Run Anyway" claim from Sun was almost entirely
marketing.
It's a claim that has always irked me. Most programming languages strive for
portability. The meaning of a "high level" language was that it moved
away from the details of the hardware instructions, letting you write programs
that were potentially portable to different implementations.
Ever since, "write once, run anywhere" has be possible. And every
programming system has implemented it. Until the second implementation comes
out.
Java did improve portability over many of the then-current common languages.
But it was an minor incremental step, rather than a breakthrough. The language
soon evolved in ways that weren't entirely compatible with itself, just like
previous attempts. And even within the single company controlling it, starting
from exactly the same interpreter/VM, there are incompatible systems.
Yes, Sun/Oracle itself is orders of magnitude worse than anyone else at
fragmenting Java. Java didn't stand the test of multiple independent
implementations being compatible. It didn't even get to that test. It
fragmented within the "single" implementation.
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