Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

I've been reading a fair amount of the purported demise of Java on Mac OS X given Mr. Jobs' stance on it with regards to the iPhone, and Apple dropping the Cocoa-Java binding.

Well, yes, Steve Jobs might very well be such a gargantuan moron as to drop Java support - but then that would immediately eliminate both NetBeans and Eclipse as IDEs for Ruby, Python, PHP, so one would assume then that programmers on Mac OS X really, really enjoy sifting through mountains of code using simple text editor.

It would eliminate JVM-based runtime, such as JRuby which often outperforms the standard Ruby runtime, and as such becomes the choice of many projects where the performance gains are a necessity.

It would mean Mac's could not be used for J2EE (despite all the hate people give it, it's still a huge draw when it comes to massive enterprise systems). That would eliminate Apple hardware from serious contention in the corporate server environments, and given their price tag, who else would they be aiming it at?

Given the fact that IBM and Oracle have such vested interests in Java, Apple would also risk alienating them. This is something Microsoft didn't need to worry about when they dropped their JRE because Sun and IBM already had working VM's for Windows - this is not the case for Apple.

Now to the part which will generate hate - in the end, who really cares if Steve Jobs drops Java? According to W3Schools, all the various versions of Windows still constitute 89.5 of installed OS's; Linux sits at 4.2%; Mac at around 5.9%. I'm not too sure where the remaining 0.4% lies, but let's assume it's made up of the various flavours of Unix (Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, AIX) all of which have or are working to have Java support.

In the greater scheme of things, is 5.9% really such a big deal? For the record, I do like Mac, and I think Mac OS X is a great OS - but let's face facts, the world does not revolve around it. Not by a long shot.

Besides, given the direction of Java becoming more and more open-source, it wouldn't be too long before an open-source project began to bring it back anyway, and that might prove to be embarrassing to Mr. Jobs, what with having his Reality Distortion Field being so heavily circumvented.

The long and short of it is, he may think it's a heavy ball-and-chair, but statistically it's one of the top 5 programming languages (by some statistic tracking, it's #1 or #2) so completely dropping it would be complete ignorance.