Why is Java more open and less buggy?
Hi,
I was looking at the 1.4 beta and noticed that many bugs are not fixed including one of which (bug ID: 4127936) is3 and 1/4 years old andwas supposed to be fixed in 1.2. This would not happen if either:
a.) Sun changed its "let's expand into every possible area but rarely fix what we've written" attitude and worked on quality over quantity or
b.) Sun allowed much, much more openness in its source code and allowed, in an easy manner, programmers to send in fixes for Java bugs and, hopefully made quicker updates to the SDKs. Perhaps downgrade the bug database and upgrade a bug fix database.
The fact is the Java is a good programming language and the Java API is improving but still very immature and buggy compared with most other languages and scripts. This is exacerbated by the fact that Sun seems to be trying to garner market share by pure breadth rather than quality or, in some cases, depth. Since I doubt they'll change this approach Sun needs to realize that instead of having each programmer individually fix or work around a bug in Sun's code that same time could be used to fix dozens of Sun's bugs if people could share the bug fixes. Maybe it's time Sun consider reuse as a being not just for outsiders concerned with Sun's API but for Sun as concerned with outsiders' fixes to Sun's code. Eh? Maybe eventually allow additions to APIs to develop out of user's open source classes instead of only the "experts" on the JCP? Nah... That would be too welcoming of open source and Sun doesn't support that.
