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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Jumped on the Java boat alongside Sun and Oracle, pivoting from Smalltalk into Java, contributions to the Linux kernel since 2000's, collaborations with Apple and Sony, helped porting Go toolchain into their micro and mainframes, acquired Red-Hat thus indirect contributions to all major Linux projects that Red-Hat works on,...

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Back in the day I read that Eclipse was based on an IBM IDE for Smalltalk called VisualAge, which they ported to VisualAge for Java, which became Smalltalk.

A while ago, so some details may be wrong.

VisualAge for Smalltalk came first.

Smalltalk (70s) came long before both Java (90s) and Visual Age (80s).

Yes, I noticed my error above, and corrected it, thanks to you, in a reply to myself.

"… IBM VisualAge for Smalltalk and IBM VisualAge for Java. Both of these products were written in Smalltalk. The IBM VisualAge Micro Edition product was the first serious and actually quite successful experiment with writing the entire IDE in Java. Many concepts found in Eclipse have been tried out in that product already. However, for third parties, it proved difficult to extend the product with new components …

A small team of experts set out to take the experiences of the previous years of designing and implementing development environments. The result was Eclipse, a platform designed from the ground up as an integration platform for development tools."

FAQ Where did Eclipse come from?

https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_did_Eclipse_come_from%3F

One of those experts, Erich Gamma, is the main VSCode architect.

Wow.

One of the GoF guys, too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma

>VisualAge for Java, which became Smalltalk.

Whoops! What a brain fart, or cosmic ray effect, or whatever :)

I meant to write:

>VisualAge for Java, which became Eclipse.

It was still possible to edit and correct my previous comment, but since people had replied already, I decided to correct myself in a reply to my own comment above.

Thanks, guys, for pointing out the mistake.

They did a lot of different experiments with JIT as well, though I don’t know how much made it into other toolchains. In particular J9 was a sort of moral equivalent of PyPy.

On the downside they are materially responsible/accomplices to the crimes that are J2EE and XML ALL THE THINGS.

I don't begrudge them XML even if I don't like how it looks. Json still doesn't have a matching schema story.

J2EE was created by Sun, based on a Objective-C framework.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhe...

JSON and YAML keep trying to re-invent the nice tooling ecosystem from XML, badly.

Sun Proposed J2EE (and made a mess of it) but what it is and what it has been had a lot of chefs.

IBM had a lot to do with both XML and J2EE being used in the most Rube Goldbergian senses possible. They didn't invent XML either.

Lots of companies had a lot to to with J2EE and XML, they are both standards, designed by a consortium of companies.

Sun, Oracle, Weblogic, IBM, Red-Hat, Rational, Microsoft, Pivotal, Apache Foundation,....

And if I have to chose between XML, endless annotations, anemic JSON, YAML spaghetti, I will take XML, thank you very much.

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