Billions of Lines

Wednesday, January 24, 1996 by Dave Winer.

More news in the last few days than in all of 1995.

Java and the Mac.

Microsoft and the Mac.

Sun and Apple sittin in a tree?

Andreessen on Microsoft.

And now Microsoft has something to say about Java.

Here's an email I got earlier today from John Ludwig, johnlu@microsoft.com:

Of course we intend to execute our license with Sun for Java; both companies have people working on this issue every day. We have no time for half measures; we announced our Letter of Intent with Sun in December because we were serious about Java support.

We are not anti-Java at all, we think it is a fine language and will see use eventually and we intend to support it. We are language neutral, we also happen to think that a lot of code will still get written in C++ and in Visual Basic and other environments. We intend to support them all. As we do today, we will evangelize multiple languages, because there are certain segments of the developer community that will be better served by Visual Basic than by Java and vice versa. One size doesn't fit all.

With respect to Visual Basic in particular, there are 3 million or more VB programmers, writing literally billions of lines of code every year. It would be imprudent to ignore this asset, this talent pool. We want to open up the Internet opportunity to all those people, and get the benefit of all their abilities to push Internet development ahead even faster.

We encourage everyone in the community to support VB programmers in their products, we are making it extremely easy to do so. The specs for VBS are on our website today, we will make the source available freely, we will incorporate it into our Internet products on all platforms. Netscape should add this support to Navigator, we think that would be a great service to the VB programmer community and to Netscape users. 3 million developers is a lot to ignore.

We will talk at greater length about our exact plans for Java and VB support at our next major developer event which is our Professional Developer's Conference in March, I invite you all to attend.

Thanks John!

Ludwig is a vice-president at Microsoft's Personal Systems Division, the part of Microsoft that does Windows 95. He reports to Brad Silverberg, bradsi@microsoft.com.

Dave Winer