"Did IBM fork Java when Oracle bought Sun? If so why isn't Oracle going after IBM"
IBM has had their own JDK implementation for more than 15 years. April 6th 1997 is about as close a date as I can find:
http://www.os2ezine.com/v2n7/javarev.htm (that's version 1.0.2, so it's probably even earlier).
IBM have a license and produced a fully compatible implementation. Before Oracle bought BEA (who bought JRockit) there was also another independent commercial JDK implementation in addition to the IBM and Sun/Oracle ones.
I really don't see why there is a need for everyone and their dog to respond to Yegge's rambling blog post. Is language [X] conservative or liberal is now littering the HN front page.
I'm a Java developer and find working with Scala a pleasure. I will admit I probably wouldn't have given it a serious look if it wasn't for JVM support.
Go does fall somewhere between the two, which is what I was getting at. Whether that's a good or a bad thing was what I hadn't made my mind up about. I like the idea of something that's expressive and fast, my thoughts are currently that it could to be more expressive.
If I wasn't interested in Go I wouldn't complain about not having binaries. You may not be running RHEL 5.0 but there are many organizations which still have many systems on it. It's not always up to Joe Developer to decide to upgrade the OS on every box in an organization. Perhaps I need to know more about building go to compile my own binaries, but not having to deal with C is one of the reason's I was looking at Go in the first place.
How is this FUD? C is faster than Go, Python takes less code than Go and the binaries don't support RHEL 5.0. I thought my post wasn't particularly biased, but I'm pretty shocked at the reaction I got :(
Go feels to me like it is trying to combine C and Python. Much more efficient than Python, but not as efficient as C. Much more expressive than C, but not as expressive as Python. I can't quite decide if that's combining the best of both worlds, or compromising on both fronts.
What's up with the official Go binaries being incompatible with RHEL 5? I might have another look in about a decade or so.