Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Judge Alsup made the exact same point in the original trial: "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?"

David Boies (counsel for Oracle): "I want to come back to rangeCheck."

Alsup: "rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it—"

Boies: "I'm not an expert on Java—this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months."

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322

Is it really common that you'd have a judge in a case end up with that kind of "subject matter expertise"? I guess I can't completely fault Boies for arguing the case in the manner you see in that exchange, but I was pretty floored that the judge could just see right through it.

He learned Java solely for the purpose of being able to understand the case more clearly. (Wikipedia) and has implied that he knows other langauges as well. He has a B.S. in math so its not too surprising.

Adorably, the Judge's full name is William Haskell Alsup.

"Your honor, we believe John Fogerty is infringing on our sound when he plays guitar like himself."

Any other way to write that method, short of changing the exception text and variable names would be silly. The truly astonishing thing is that enough people could be fooled to think otherwise.

Well, there are 6 different orders in which you could insert the 3 if statements, but I'm not sure that's a material difference :-)

Yes and no, if the first conditional is moved then the behavior of the function would be different. You could for example specify a fromIndex of -1 and a toIndex of -2. That would result in an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException instead of an IllegalArgumentException. Arguably, it doesn't matter but if it's different than it wouldn't necessarily be compatible with other calling code.

Of course that still leaves two other arrangements of the remaining code.

Nice Fogerty reference! (He's citing this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogerty_v._Fantasy,_Inc.)

This line also stood out to me:

> [Oracle]: even Java programmers don't learn about Java bytecode.

Uh, what? I'd hardly call myself a dedicated Java programmer and I've learned about Java bytecode. I had to, and wanted to. I'd guess most professional Java programmers would consider it a point of pride to do the same!

I've worked in many large Java enterprises and nobody knew about the bytecode. They knew it was there but not what it consisted of how it was structured. It's no different to many C/C++/Go etc developers not understanding what ASM gets generated.

I guess that makes sense actually, I think I only even ran into an issue where bytecode was actually relevant because I'm just a hobbyist programmer. So I like to explore things that have only marginal utility and don't have anyone else to help out with specialist stuff. I can imagine how a professional developer wouldn't ever want or need to deal with bytecode.

I was taught JVM bytecode as part of a required class for my CS degree. We had to write a rudimentary interpreter for a subset of it.

While it might not be required to dig deep into the bytecode, the fact that Java comes completely with a suite of tools for dealing with bytecode suggests Sun did expect developers to understand and work with the JVM bytecode at some level.

Situations like this intrigue me, where the ethical thing to do is not the moral thing. Morally, it's reprehensible that a man as smart and distinguished as Boies could make an argument like that with a straight face, but, ethically, he's doing exactly what he should do as an attorney for his client. And he can can use that ability for good as well as evil, as evidenced in his work for the Justice Department in the Microsoft anti-trust trial. It's perverse and gross, and he makes more money in a year doing that than I'll make in my lifetime.

Why is that the ethical thing to do? It seems like the ethical thing to do is to go to your client and say, look, I hear this judge writes code, and even if not I hear the other side has expert witnesses. We're not going to be able to win on rangeCheck. Let's pursue the "structure, sequence, and organization" angle, it'll be more worth the money you're paying me.

(And in fact they did not get a meaningful win on rangeCheck, and the case is back before Judge Alsup with his view of structure-sequence-and-organization overturned.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com