For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.
When we're building tools, we respect developers' complete creative freedom. It can be used for the development for anything that's legal.
You see people doing Java-based internal applications all over the place, regular desktop applications that are sort of front-ends to the things in the back, or standalone things.
In 2007, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would become a 'platform,' meaning that outside developers could start creating applications that would run inside the site. It worked.
When I started at Microsoft, I was lucky enough to be part of the rise of the client-server paradigm.
I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007.
When I talk about that Apple ecosystem, the ability to get one application to run across those five platforms is very difficult. In the future of Microsoft, using HTML5, IE9 and 10, the scalable OS, the ability to do that gets much, much easier.
I know one business, and that's how to make software.
I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.
The single most important thing for any processor is getting adoption by software developers.
The collision of mobile and social platforms and the need to build these companies from the ground up - whether it's a game, a healthcare application, an education application - building these from the ground up is what allows entrepreneurial activity to be unleashed.
Workday is constantly looking into the future and, you know, building applications that stay modern and relevant.
It's difficult for any single company to develop all the applications and services.
It's never the end game. Facebook is now a platform upon which all kinds of applications are being built it's definitely not it.
Let's face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That's why they've got 75,000 applications - they're all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.
Mark Hammond is working in this area, with Windows Scripting Host. It is definitely an area where Python fits almost perfectly. That's quite independent from Java, actually.
Android is one of the most open systems I've ever seen. What makes Android great is it's literally designed from the ground up to be customised in a very powerful way.
When it comes to .NET they've done a really outstanding job.
C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.
People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product.
I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.
It's something special being able to build a program up.
If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.
Life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body.
No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.
