5 ms·

Joel on Software: "By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java"

78 points by twampss 18y ago

mechanical_fish 18y ago
If you can’t think of anything to say, maybe you should just up. Although Joel's writing a post about omitting needless words, I think this sentence needs an additional word. Sometimes I wonder if blogs could use a "typo alert" button.
- 11ren 18y ago
  great idea, not a full-blown comment, but a small link (like "flag") that gives room for a one line description. Most typos are pretty short, and are covered by something like the below. Even if the description happened to be ambiguous, it would be enough of a heads up for the blogger to find it. I'd think it's not attractive enough to spammers to warrant a captcha. s/just up/just shut up/
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    What I have in mind would be a direct message to the author, not a public message. That should further discourage spammers -- I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time. You might want to have some feedback that informs a person who is about to report a typo that 4 or 5 other people have already reported a typo on a given post. That might help discourage the phenomenon where a single typo generates a flood of 10,000 helpful reports.
    - 11ren 18y ago
      Yes, I meant a direct message too - like a flag - because it would discourage spammers. I didn't unpack it, so it was ambiguous. I'm not sure if the "10,000" reports would happen; have to try it and see. It's probably more like bug-reports, or 37signal's "feature requests" (that they read and throw out). And, if you fix the typo, the reports stop. :-) It's hard to judge, but I think you'd have to be massively popular to get even one or two typo reports. But I don't know: need to do the experiment. Maybe a lower-cost solution would be just to add "prompting" text next to the comment box, something like: "typo corrections are welcome", to encourage people. Typo reports (bug reports?) aren't that common: for example, I made a comment on a typo to Tim O'Reilly's recent blog - but no one else had.
      - mechanical_fish 18y ago
        The problem is that grammar flames are socially awkward. They've got a bad reputation on the web that goes way back to Usenet days. To issue one is kind of like telling someone that they've got some food on their face. But it's worse, because on the web you can't whisper: By default your criticism is preserved forever, smack in the middle of what's supposed to be a conversation about something other than grammar. Unless the author takes the trouble to delete some comments -- which is an extra step, and which can also sometimes be socially awkward, since comment deletion is generally reserved for trolls. I wouldn't have bothered correcting this one if I hadn't been able to make a lame joke at the same time. I agree that a feature to fix this might well not have enough utility to be worthwhile, which is perhaps why nobody's built it yet!
        11ren 18y ago
        I hadn't thought of that aspect. Being public makes it worse. Personally, I've always appreciated feedback on a website - but in a discussion, I agree it's a diversion that undermines the message (and is annoying). Commenting on blogs are sort of in between those two (really, a discussion if the blogger also comments, as they often do). Some kind of threaded comments might help. e.g. on reddit, you can compress the joke-thread and the pun-thread, to get to the on-topic commentary. A "typo thread"? Or an explicit "typo" tag (which you could hide from the public, and so disable captcha, if you wanted). But I haven't seen threaded comments on blogs - maybe they aren't needed? It seems an obvious idea to try.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      > I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time. I get a ton of spam via the GitHub web interface. It is really annoying.
      - pjhyett 18y ago
        How much spam qualifies as a ton?
      - mechanical_fish 18y ago
        Oh, well. There goes another theory out the window.
- andreyf 18y ago
  What's strange is that I mentally inserted the word the first ~10 times I read that sentence...
stcredzero 18y ago
Why should users ever install a VM? Why couldn't Java be distributed as a meta-environment where the right version just downloads and installs itself, and a particular application only sees the most recent available version of the runtime environment that it can run against?
- johngunderman 18y ago
  meta-environment? That's basically what a VM is in the first place. As for the automatic download-install, linux package managers will already do that for you. Of course, not for web apps, but who wants a web app telling their computer to download and install a program???
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    So why not add another level of meta? Why should the user even have to go to the package manager? If the user has stumbled across an app for which she/he doesn't have the right VM+runtime, why do they have to do any more than wait for the download to happen? OS X has a mechanism such that a program only sees the versions of system libraries that it needs. There's no reason why Java couldn't have one as well. We programmers may not like a web app telling the computer to download and install a program. The average user would rather have the system do it for them -- just so long as they don't have to worry about anything they don't understand.
    - arockwell 18y ago
      If you visit a page that needs java doesn't it already prompt you to download the jre?
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      well do you mean like the flash runtime does (well on windows at least, haven't seen it work for me for other platforms).
    - johngunderman 18y ago
      That's exactly what the package manager does. If you install a program that needs the JVM, it will automatically download and install it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "another level of meta"?
BigCanOfTuna 18y ago
How many times does "Joel on Software" show up on this blog entry? I count 5 times, including the Title and email address. Pot...kettle...black.
- johngunderman 18y ago
  Yet only once in the body (well, the info paragraph at the bottom). All other references are actually part of the page itself. Futhermore, the info paragraph is probably boilerplate, dropping the times he "mentioned" his blog title down to zero. I wouldnt say that was the pot calling the kettle black in any way, shape, or form.
  - BigCanOfTuna 18y ago
    I would. Joel is doing exactly what Sun is doing...saturating your mind with key words/phrases. It's Branding/Marketing.
    - johngunderman 18y ago
      Yep. Except the saturation has context. It isn't blatantly uninformative.
    - alex_c 18y ago
      I found it particularly amusing that after seeing "Joel on Software" in the title here on news.yc, "joelonsoftware.com" after the title, and "Joel on Software" twice on the page before the article, the first words after the article itself were "You’re reading Joel on Software". I had to scan the entire page to see if he's spoofing Sun's behavior.
      - yters 18y ago
        Very clever spoof of Joel on Software. You've captured his unintentional irony perfectly. Now that I've seen "Joel on Software" 7 times in this thread, I can't help but think "Joel on Software" when I see "Joel," "on," or "Software."
drcode 18y ago
<sarcasm> Why do we have previews in movie theaters before the movie starts? The screen could just be black until the main feature begins. Or, the screen could just read "There are other movies coming out" that would pretty much say the same thing. </sarcasm>
- johngunderman 18y ago
  nah, its more a preview that goes as such: "Check out this movie! Critics love this movie! Come see this movie! It has action, romance, comedy! If you watch this movie, you will know how much you like it!"
mattmcknight 18y ago
Given the JVM startup times, shouldn't it say "Please Wait.............Java Loves You". Ha ha...ooops not really actually funny at all. I'll leave it though. Sorry. (I'm not bitter, I just had to restart tomcat over 50 times today. It has its upside: 12145ms x 50, enough time to read a couple of items on hacker news. I wonder how much this post will cost Sun? There will probably be a bug in their tracker by morning. Maybe Joel's just making an issue out of these little things so their bug tracking will be overwhelmed and they'll have to turn to FogBugz?)
- michaelneale 18y ago
  Oh there are quite a few different installers. There are much worse ones. I recall one that bundled the yahoo toolbar (!), and said something like: "would you like to install the free Yahoo Toolbar with The Java". (cut of prematurely).
- Andys 18y ago
  Sun - We're the dot in "Please wait............."
- trapper 18y ago
  Why on earth did you restart 50 times? zeroturnaround.com?
  - mattmcknight 18y ago
    Hot redeploy not working for this app in development.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
axod 18y ago
No idea why you would install java using some UI like that in the first place.
- astine 18y ago
  Because it's the standard installer on Windows and the one that millions of people who just want to use some Java-based funcationality on some website are directed to?
  - axod 18y ago
    Java applets? eek ok,
zack 18y ago
I disagree with all of you. I love that dialog. When it came on, when I was first installing Java, I had no idea what Java was. But then, I got excited about Java. YeAH! :)
voidpointer 18y ago
Well, it has been pointed out before, but this is just too funny. I hadn't looked at joel's site for some time and I had to check some other posts to tell whether the blurbs under the real posts were there for humorous reasons or whether they were an actual part of the page template. Unfortunately the latter is true. He could just put "Joel loves developers." What's there sounds like the same kind of marketing department cool-aid that the poor engineers at Sun are forced to put in their installers. Now, if you are tempted to say something like "the inmates are running the asylum" in Sun's case that may very well be true: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm :-)
bprater 18y ago
Could we actually have some real conversation about the topic?
- presty 18y ago
  It would be nice if the topic had some real subject to talk about.
gills 18y ago
He missed the seventh 'Java' in the title bar...
falsestprophet 18y ago
Welcome to http://zombo.com http://zombo.com. This is zombo-com. You can do anything at zombo-com--anything at all. The only limit is your self.
megaduck 18y ago
I wince everytime I see something like this pop up. The JVM is an awesome piece of technology, and the Java language is a good replacement for C++ in a lot of cases. There's also a neat little ecosystem of alternative JVM languages sprouting up. Unfortunately, it's hampered by Sun's TERRIBLE marketing and crappy design on things like the installer. I'm glad they finally open-sourced Java, as it gives us the option to fork the platform instead of constantly worrying that Sun's going to screw it up.
hs 18y ago
being succinct is un-java

78 points by twampss 18y ago

If you can’t think of anything to say, maybe you should just up. Although Joel's writing a post about omitting needless words, I think this sentence needs an additional word. Sometimes I wonder if blogs could use a "typo alert" button.

11ren 18y ago
great idea, not a full-blown comment, but a small link (like "flag") that gives room for a one line description. Most typos are pretty short, and are covered by something like the below. Even if the description happened to be ambiguous, it would be enough of a heads up for the blogger to find it. I'd think it's not attractive enough to spammers to warrant a captcha. s/just up/just shut up/
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  What I have in mind would be a direct message to the author, not a public message. That should further discourage spammers -- I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time. You might want to have some feedback that informs a person who is about to report a typo that 4 or 5 other people have already reported a typo on a given post. That might help discourage the phenomenon where a single typo generates a flood of 10,000 helpful reports.
  - 11ren 18y ago
    Yes, I meant a direct message too - like a flag - because it would discourage spammers. I didn't unpack it, so it was ambiguous. I'm not sure if the "10,000" reports would happen; have to try it and see. It's probably more like bug-reports, or 37signal's "feature requests" (that they read and throw out). And, if you fix the typo, the reports stop. :-) It's hard to judge, but I think you'd have to be massively popular to get even one or two typo reports. But I don't know: need to do the experiment. Maybe a lower-cost solution would be just to add "prompting" text next to the comment box, something like: "typo corrections are welcome", to encourage people. Typo reports (bug reports?) aren't that common: for example, I made a comment on a typo to Tim O'Reilly's recent blog - but no one else had.
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      The problem is that grammar flames are socially awkward. They've got a bad reputation on the web that goes way back to Usenet days. To issue one is kind of like telling someone that they've got some food on their face. But it's worse, because on the web you can't whisper: By default your criticism is preserved forever, smack in the middle of what's supposed to be a conversation about something other than grammar. Unless the author takes the trouble to delete some comments -- which is an extra step, and which can also sometimes be socially awkward, since comment deletion is generally reserved for trolls. I wouldn't have bothered correcting this one if I hadn't been able to make a lame joke at the same time. I agree that a feature to fix this might well not have enough utility to be worthwhile, which is perhaps why nobody's built it yet!
      - 11ren 18y ago
        I hadn't thought of that aspect. Being public makes it worse. Personally, I've always appreciated feedback on a website - but in a discussion, I agree it's a diversion that undermines the message (and is annoying). Commenting on blogs are sort of in between those two (really, a discussion if the blogger also comments, as they often do). Some kind of threaded comments might help. e.g. on reddit, you can compress the joke-thread and the pun-thread, to get to the on-topic commentary. A "typo thread"? Or an explicit "typo" tag (which you could hide from the public, and so disable captcha, if you wanted). But I haven't seen threaded comments on blogs - maybe they aren't needed? It seems an obvious idea to try.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    > I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time. I get a ton of spam via the GitHub web interface. It is really annoying.
    - pjhyett 18y ago
      How much spam qualifies as a ton?
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      Oh, well. There goes another theory out the window.
andreyf 18y ago
What's strange is that I mentally inserted the word the first ~10 times I read that sentence...

stcredzero 18y ago

Why should users ever install a VM? Why couldn't Java be distributed as a meta-environment where the right version just downloads and installs itself, and a particular application only sees the most recent available version of the runtime environment that it can run against?

johngunderman 18y ago
meta-environment? That's basically what a VM is in the first place. As for the automatic download-install, linux package managers will already do that for you. Of course, not for web apps, but who wants a web app telling their computer to download and install a program???
- stcredzero 18y ago
  So why not add another level of meta? Why should the user even have to go to the package manager? If the user has stumbled across an app for which she/he doesn't have the right VM+runtime, why do they have to do any more than wait for the download to happen? OS X has a mechanism such that a program only sees the versions of system libraries that it needs. There's no reason why Java couldn't have one as well. We programmers may not like a web app telling the computer to download and install a program. The average user would rather have the system do it for them -- just so long as they don't have to worry about anything they don't understand.
  - arockwell 18y ago
    If you visit a page that needs java doesn't it already prompt you to download the jre?
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    well do you mean like the flash runtime does (well on windows at least, haven't seen it work for me for other platforms).
  - johngunderman 18y ago
    That's exactly what the package manager does. If you install a program that needs the JVM, it will automatically download and install it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "another level of meta"?

BigCanOfTuna 18y ago

How many times does "Joel on Software" show up on this blog entry? I count 5 times, including the Title and email address. Pot...kettle...black.

johngunderman 18y ago
Yet only once in the body (well, the info paragraph at the bottom). All other references are actually part of the page itself. Futhermore, the info paragraph is probably boilerplate, dropping the times he "mentioned" his blog title down to zero. I wouldnt say that was the pot calling the kettle black in any way, shape, or form.
- BigCanOfTuna 18y ago
  I would. Joel is doing exactly what Sun is doing...saturating your mind with key words/phrases. It's Branding/Marketing.
  - johngunderman 18y ago
    Yep. Except the saturation has context. It isn't blatantly uninformative.
  - alex_c 18y ago
    I found it particularly amusing that after seeing "Joel on Software" in the title here on news.yc, "joelonsoftware.com" after the title, and "Joel on Software" twice on the page before the article, the first words after the article itself were "You’re reading Joel on Software". I had to scan the entire page to see if he's spoofing Sun's behavior.
    - yters 18y ago
      Very clever spoof of Joel on Software. You've captured his unintentional irony perfectly. Now that I've seen "Joel on Software" 7 times in this thread, I can't help but think "Joel on Software" when I see "Joel," "on," or "Software."

drcode 18y ago

<sarcasm> Why do we have previews in movie theaters before the movie starts? The screen could just be black until the main feature begins. Or, the screen could just read "There are other movies coming out" that would pretty much say the same thing. </sarcasm>

johngunderman 18y ago
nah, its more a preview that goes as such: "Check out this movie! Critics love this movie! Come see this movie! It has action, romance, comedy! If you watch this movie, you will know how much you like it!"

mattmcknight 18y ago

Given the JVM startup times, shouldn't it say "Please Wait.............Java Loves You". Ha ha...ooops not really actually funny at all. I'll leave it though. Sorry. (I'm not bitter, I just had to restart tomcat over 50 times today. It has its upside: 12145ms x 50, enough time to read a couple of items on hacker news. I wonder how much this post will cost Sun? There will probably be a bug in their tracker by morning. Maybe Joel's just making an issue out of these little things so their bug tracking will be overwhelmed and they'll have to turn to FogBugz?)

michaelneale 18y ago
Oh there are quite a few different installers. There are much worse ones. I recall one that bundled the yahoo toolbar (!), and said something like: "would you like to install the free Yahoo Toolbar with The Java". (cut of prematurely).
Andys 18y ago
Sun - We're the dot in "Please wait............."
trapper 18y ago
Why on earth did you restart 50 times? zeroturnaround.com?
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  Hot redeploy not working for this app in development.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

axod 18y ago

No idea why you would install java using some UI like that in the first place.

astine 18y ago
Because it's the standard installer on Windows and the one that millions of people who just want to use some Java-based funcationality on some website are directed to?
- axod 18y ago
  Java applets? eek ok,

zack 18y ago

I disagree with all of you. I love that dialog. When it came on, when I was first installing Java, I had no idea what Java was. But then, I got excited about Java. YeAH! :)

voidpointer 18y ago

Well, it has been pointed out before, but this is just too funny. I hadn't looked at joel's site for some time and I had to check some other posts to tell whether the blurbs under the real posts were there for humorous reasons or whether they were an actual part of the page template. Unfortunately the latter is true. He could just put "Joel loves developers." What's there sounds like the same kind of marketing department cool-aid that the poor engineers at Sun are forced to put in their installers. Now, if you are tempted to say something like "the inmates are running the asylum" in Sun's case that may very well be true: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm :-)

bprater 18y ago

Could we actually have some real conversation about the topic?

presty 18y ago
It would be nice if the topic had some real subject to talk about.

gills 18y ago

He missed the seventh 'Java' in the title bar...

falsestprophet 18y ago

Welcome to http://zombo.com http://zombo.com. This is zombo-com. You can do anything at zombo-com--anything at all. The only limit is your self.

megaduck 18y ago

I wince everytime I see something like this pop up. The JVM is an awesome piece of technology, and the Java language is a good replacement for C++ in a lot of cases. There's also a neat little ecosystem of alternative JVM languages sprouting up. Unfortunately, it's hampered by Sun's TERRIBLE marketing and crappy design on things like the installer. I'm glad they finally open-sourced Java, as it gives us the option to fork the platform instead of constantly worrying that Sun's going to screw it up.

hs 18y ago

being succinct is un-java